


Clean Air

by anactoria



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Community: deancasbigbang, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge 2014, M/M, Minor Character Death, Minor Lisa Braeden/Dean Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-06
Updated: 2014-11-06
Packaged: 2018-02-22 14:29:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 121,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2511038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anactoria/pseuds/anactoria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Centuries after the surface of the earth was devastated by an unknown disaster, the remnants of humanity live in a series of vast underground silos, each unaware of the existence of the others.</p>
<p>For the inhabitants of Silo 34, the silo is the world, and the only world they know. Questions about the outside world are forbidden, and asking them is what got Dean Winchester's parents killed. He isn't even sure himself that they weren't crazy.</p>
<p>That all changes when he hears a voice on the radio -- a voice from another world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> As you may already have guessed if you know the books, this story is a fusion with Hugh Howey's [Wool](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wool-Trilogy-1-Hugh-Howey/dp/0099580489) trilogy, though I've tweaked an aspect or two of the worldbuilding for plot's sake. You shouldn't need to have read the trilogy to understand the story, though.
> 
> Many thanks to my wonderful betas, [frozen_delight](http://frozen-delight.livejournal.com), [beenghosting](http://www.archiveofourown.com/users/beenghosting), and [brightly_lit](http://brightly-lit.livejournal.com) for all their help. You've all been amazing. :)
> 
> I'm posting this fic a little late, since it seems that my assigned artist has had to drop out, and I haven't heard anything back from the mods. However, I was lucky enough to have the incredibly talented [alexisjane](http://alexisjane.livejournal.com) step in and rustle up some fantastic headers and title cards in two minutes flat. Lady is a rockstar. <33
> 
> ETA: There's now also some amazing [bonus art](http://kalliel.livejournal.com/313527.html) by [kalliel](http://kalliel.livejournal.com) and [amber1960](http://amber1960.livejournal.com)! How are there so many kind and talented people in this fandom??

__  


 

__

 

_The Silo_

 

“Sheriff, this is crazy talk. You’re not in your right mind.”

“Believe me, I wish that were true,” he says, but he’s smiling back at her. Bright and untroubled, like he hasn’t since Mary died.

Ellen plants her hands on her hips and tries hard not to think about how, right this moment, he looks like her friend again. Like the man Mary fell in love with, the guy Bill would’ve followed right to the surface of the earth, if he’d asked.

“Come on,” she says. “You don’t have to do this. It’s just me and you in here. Nobody else has to know. You’ll take a couple weeks off, we’ll get you some counselling. I’m willing to forget these last five minutes ever happened.”

He shakes his head. “My mind’s made up, Mayor.”

“Sheriff. _John_. Don’t make me do this.”

“I’m sorry, Ellen. I truly am.” He at least has the grace to look like he means it. “I want to go _outside_.”

 

 

 

 

“The hell are you doing still down here, boy?”

Dean keeps his eyes on the soldering iron in his hand. Focuses on the clatter of Mechanical setting up for another day, the corridor outside echoing with chatter as the morning shift takes over, and does his best to tune out Bobby’s voice.

“I know you heard me.”

He grits his teeth. “I got work to do.”

“You got a month’s worth of vacation chits you never use and young legs’ll get you to the up tops in a day, is what you got. Now if you won’t get up there and pay your respects to your old man, at least go pay him mine.”

“It ain’t a funeral, Bobby, it’s an execution.” Dean replaces the soldering iron, eyes narrowing behind his safety goggles. “What d’you want me to do, stand shoulder to shoulder with all the vultures hanging around up there for a look through their clean shiny viewscreen and not punch anybody in the goddamn face?”

“Only choice you got, unless you want to be next out that door.”

Dean scowls. “They won’t get it, anyway.”

“You think he’ll refuse to clean? Nobody ever has.”

“Yeah, well. I know my dad.” He swallows, looks at his hands. “Least, I thought I did.” That last part’s a mutter under his breath, spoken mostly to himself.

Bobby catches it, though—of course he fucking does—and he manoeuvres his chair up to the bench, fixing Dean with a Singer Special _cut the bullshit_ look. “You’re angry. I get that. Hell, _I’m_ angry—at your old man, much as anybody else.” He pauses then, and there’s this flicker of distance in his eyes, and oh, crap. Dean knows what he’s gonna say next before it comes out: “You got every right to be angry. But you don’t get up there and say your goodbyes while you got the chance, you will _never_ stop regretting it.”

Because Dean has never really thought about it before, never tried to piece the timeline together. He only has the vaguest childhood memories of Bobby out of his chair, and the idea of Bobby anywhere outside of the down deeps doesn’t quite compute. But.

Bobby had his accident the year after Karen was sent to cleaning. He could’ve followed the crowds to the up tops. Could’ve watched her walk out through that door into the toxic air, strained to catch one last glimpse of her face through the visor as she wiped the viewscreen clean. Could’ve memorised the place where she fell—had some kind of a marker to remember her by, the way other families have stunted apple trees planted in the mids, the way Dean has a dip in the ground outside that Dad pointed to on the viewscreen, just once, with a shaky finger and said, _that’s where your mom is._

But Bobby didn’t. The dead weight of it is there in his voice, in the slump of his shoulders, and it’s what tells Dean that he’s lost the argument.

“Get outta here,” Bobby tells him. “I may not be your caster anymore, but I will still kick your ass right up to the mids if I find you back here tomorrow, legs or no legs.”

Dean lets out a sigh, shoves his goggles up over his head. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, alright, I’m gone.”

He takes one of the radios he’s been fixing up in his off hours with him, snagging a couple spare components out of the latest box of deliveries on his way out. Hey, he’s gonna need something to take his mind off things tonight, when he inevitably gives up on sleeping. Maybe Bobby’s right, maybe he’s gotta do this, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna bring him any peace. After all, he already knows what he’ll see.

One more person Dean loves, turning his back and walking away.

 

 

 

 

Benny’s over on the other side of the section, by the look of things giving one of the new shadows an earful about not putting her tools away properly. Dean isn’t in the mood for conversation with anyone right now, so instead of going over he raps his fist against the silo wall where it rings hollow, their usual way of getting attention across the noise, and points upstairs to indicate he’s cutting out early.

He drops in to see Lisa before he heads up, lets her know he’s not gonna swing by tonight like he was planning, promises to bring Ben a fresh tomato from the mids on his way back down. She’s a smart chick, luckily enough—doesn’t try to soothe him with platitudes, just sends him on his way with a murmur of understanding.

Then he makes his way to the vast central staircase, gets his head down, and climbs.

Climbing’s a bitch. Dean isn’t in bad shape, but he hasn’t made a trip like this in maybe two years—not since Dad made it abundantly clear that he didn’t want Dean’s help, and Sammy made it even clearer that he didn’t want anything to do with either of them—and by the time he’s out of the down deeps, his legs are aching and he’s starting to wish he’d brought an extra water canteen. A couple middle-aged porters, carrying a double load of faulty parts back up to Supply, trot past him at a breakneck pace, and just looking at them makes Dean’s lungs hurt.

That’s okay, though. When he stops on One-Forty to fill up, and Jody in the security station gives him a wave, he can pretend like he’s out of breath to avoid her commiserations.

Late afternoon, Dean stops off in the mids, goes looking for Pam. There’ll be hell to pay if he avoids her, he knows—plus, he figures she’s one of the few people he could stand to be around right now, has enough honesty and enough black humour in her that she couldn’t come out with a cliché if she tried.

The farms are peaceful, the light of the growlamps showing soft and green through the vegetation, the low background hum of hydroponics a constant. He finds Pam on her knees in the soil near the back of her plot, trowel in hand. She gets to her feet as she hears him approach, smiles.

“Dean Winchester,” she says, before he’s even opened his mouth to greet her.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know how you do that.”

“You know what they say. You lose one sense, you develop others.” She wiggles her fingers in what Dean figures is supposed to be a _spooky_ gesture. “Second sight.”

He manages a laugh, though it’s half-assed. “I ain’t buying it.”

Pam’s face softens, the brightness of her smile turning down a couple notches. “I heard the news. Figured you’d show up.”

“Yeah.” Dean heaves a sigh. If Pam hears it, she’s kind enough not to look like she does. “Came to see if I could scrounge up something to eat. Fair exchange, of course. I got the chits—unless there’s anything round here needs fixing? Save you calling Maintenance.”

Pam just nods and says that a few of them are gonna be eating in a half hour or so, and there’s a sprinkler in the corner that isn’t working, so Dean can keep himself busy with that while he waits. He grabs a ladder and gets on it willingly, glad for something to occupy his mind after most of a day on the stairs. Climbing’s hard on the legs, sure, but it’s easy on the brain in a way Dean doesn’t need right now, the rhythmic mindlessness of it giving him way too much time to turn over old grievances and _what if_ s and _should’ve_ s in his head. He focuses hard on the task, willing away all the crap he’s been thinking about during the climb, and then he fixes up a loose cover on a vent that doesn’t seem to be doing anything, and by the time he’s done, one of Pam’s coworkers is poking her head between two rows of beans, telling them they better haul ass if they don’t want to go hungry.

They squeeze themselves in on the end of one of the long communal tables. It’s noisy, and Pam dives right on into the chatter, gesturing energetically with her fork as she argues with a neighbour about the best temperature for growing strawberries. Dean keeps quiet, mostly, eats and lets the shop talk wash over him, paying just enough attention for it to keep his mind off more important things.

He’s standing in line to wash up afterwards when Pam comes up beside him and squeezes his shoulder.

“Becky says she’ll watch my plot for a couple nights,” she tells him. “I’ll climb with you.”

Honestly, Dean isn’t sure he wants the company. Part of him—okay, most of him—just wants to be left the fuck alone right now. On the other hand, there’s still that whole thinking thing he really doesn’t want to do.

He doesn’t say any of that. He cracks a smile. “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “You just wanna come get drunk with Ellen, don’t you?”

Just for a second, Pam looks like she might contradict him, say something serious. Then she smirks, says, “You got me. Get your things, I’ll be ready in fifteen.”

“Sure,” Dean says. He watches her go.

Pam knew his parents, when they were younger, same as Ellen did, and Bobby. She’s a couple years younger than the rest of them, not old enough to have been involved in any of what went down, but she remembers. Dean’s pretty sure of that. He also knows—from experience—that trying to get any information about the old days out of any of them is about as much use as banging your head against the silo wall, but he wonders. Maybe he might find a clue in there somewhere, this time around. People get nostalgic at funerals, right?

“Move it along, kid. Some of us got work to do.” Dean realises he’s gotten to the front of the line.

He shakes himself, scowls, and sets to scrubbing his plate. This isn’t a funeral. He’s gotta keep reminding himself of that. And maybe he doesn’t want a clue.

 

 

 

They make camp on Twenty-Five, shortly before midnight. The guy manning the security station scowls at them when they start to set up, looking like he’s just itching to get over there and move them on, but doesn’t say anything. Not like they’re gonna be cluttering up his landing for long, anyway. They’ll be up early for the final climb to the up tops, ready for the cleaning at the break of dawn.

It doesn’t make much sense to Dean, the way the people up top run their lives by the schedule of an outside world they aren’t really a part of. _Outside_ isn’t a thing you think about much in the down deeps. It feels like another world. Living up here, though, with it always in view but never close enough to touch, watching the light change out there, knowing the surface is just a little way above your head—yeah, it’d be hard to forget about it.

Maybe that’s what made Dad crazy. Being able to just look out there anytime he wanted and see where Mom—

Dean frowns, shoves the thought down. Lets himself be distracted by Pam rummaging in her pack, producing a small tin of dried dark green and two tin mugs, which she holds out to him.

“Go get some hot water,” she tells him. “We need the sleep.”

The scowling guy on the security station looks to have gone home for the night, when Dean gets over there. He’s been replaced by a different guy—younger, good-looking in a way Dean might notice in more than passing if this was a different day—who he soon charms into letting them have a canteen of hot water and a couple shots of the whiskey stashed away in the desk drawer.

He and Pam sit and drink in companiable silence. You’ve got to hand it to Pam—she may like to talk, but when it comes down to it, she knows what quiet is, and when it’s necessary.

But even with the quiet and the tea and the alcohol, Dean isn’t sleepy. When Pam turns in early, pulling her sleeping bag up over her head, he still feels restless. He gets to his feet and makes his way over to the stair rail, leaning out over it, staring down into the depths to where his eyesight runs out and the staircase and the people dissolve into darkness. Up here, the silo turns quiet at night, most of the sections manned by skeleton crews. It oughta be peaceful. Only, looking out makes him think about how far buried in that blackness the down deeps are, and how Dad won’t ever see them again, and in the end he turns away, trying to tamp down on the sick feeling in his gut.

He ends up pulling Bobby’s radio out of his pack, sitting up with a flashlight nestled in the crook of his arm while he tries to finish fixing the damn thing. He fixes in the spare receiver he grabbed earlier and switches it on, which earns him a brief crackle of white noise. Life, even if it’s life with nothing to say for itself.

Dean peers at the inside of the radio again. Funny, but the receiver he’s fitted doesn’t look exactly like the ones they normally use for their radios down in Mechanical. It’s hard to tell, with only his flashlight and the shitty emergency lighting on the stairs to see by, but it looks like there’s a different component number on there. He shrugs, fits on the back of the radio, and tries again.

More static.

Then, somewhere deep within the white noise, indistinct with it, somebody says, _Hello?_

It’s enough to startle him, in the quiet sleeping dark of the up tops at night. Just hello—no name, no floor number. It sounds far away, like a ghost hanging somewhere in the ether. Dean stares at the radio for a second before he presses the button and speaks into it.

“Hey,” he says, and then he hesitates. Answering with your last name is normal practice. But _Winchester_ is pretty well known around the silo right now, and not in a good way, and there is no universe in which Dean is up for discussing that with some random stranger. “Name’s Dean,” he says, at last. “Up on Twenty-Five. You?”

Another wash of static, a stutter of chopped-off consonants. Then the flat crackle of dead air.

“Hey,” Dean says, again. He pulls the back off the radio and fiddles with the receiver again, which does nothing. He takes out the transmitter and replaces it, even shakes the damn thing a little, but his ghost stays gone.

 

 

 

The last twenty floors are an easy climb, but they make it in silence. Dean didn’t hear another peep from his radio ghost, but he hasn’t slept, either. Even with the luxury of fresh fruit from Pam’s plot on offer, he couldn’t stomach breakfast. His back aches from the hard floor.

None of those things is why he feels his feet dragging as they reach the up tops.

The foot traffic thickens around them as they climb, most of it heading up. Going to watch the cleaning.

The faces around them are mostly solemn, but the quiet’s broken by snatches of gossip, snacks being shared around between groups of climbers, kids balanced on their parents’ shoulders being reassured that yes, after this, they really will get their first clear glimpse of the outside world. It’s the first cleaning in years, after all; the viewscreen’s been thick with grime since most of these kids were born.

The serious expressions—they’re just custom, like wearing black to the funeral of someone you didn’t really know. Beyond that, this is an occasion, it’s fucking Christmas to most of the silo. It’s that undercurrent of excitement that really buoys these people up. Dean can feel it all around him, in the bodies crowding the stairs and the voices that echo up through the space. It crowds in on him, rubs up against the raw edges of his loss and his anger until his shoulders are a stiff line and he wants to start throwing punches. He doesn’t see anyone he recognizes in the throng—which, good, because no way in hell could he be held responsible if he did. Once in a while, though, someone will turn and catch his eye, and he’ll see them take in his grimness and silence, maybe the resemblance to Dad in his face, and look away quickly.

He doesn’t look at them. He keeps climbing.

By the time they reach the cafeteria, they have to push their way through. Normally, Dean would let Pam go first—easier to let people’s politeness do the work of parting the crowd—but today he doesn’t have time for that. He bulldozes his way through, ignoring the string of aggrieved ‘Hey!’s he leaves in his path, and Pam grabs onto his arm and follows behind.

He spies Ellen, standing off to the side, near the airlock doors. Her arms are folded over her chest and she’s standing stiffly upright, her face drawn. She looks like she hasn’t slept in a while.

Which, yeah. She damn well shouldn’t. Dean’s about to head over there—though he doesn’t know what he’ll say, whether it’s gonna come out as a plea or just a string of recriminations—when he realises who’s standing next to her and comes to an abrupt stop, Pam stumbling into his side.

“Shit,” he manages, turning to look at her. “Sorry.”

“No problem, hon,” Pam says. She turns her face in his direction, and although she can’t see what he’s looking at, after a moment, she says, “So, that handsome brother of yours is up here, huh?”

Keeping it light, like always, but then most of the time she doesn’t actually need to say the important shit out loud.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, he is.”

Sam looks as grim-faced as Dean feels. He’s dressed in IT white, neat and clean, not a rip or a smear of grease to be seen on him. His hair’s gotten longer. Next to him is a blonde girl, also in white, who Dean doesn’t recognise. She’s pressed close into Sam’s side, her arm curled through his in a gesture of reassurance.

Not that there’s much for anyone to feel reassured about right now.

“So come on,” Pam says to him, and she’s off before he has a chance to protest, winding her way through the crowd—sparser back here; everybody’s jostling for a look at the goddamn viewscreen down front—so that Dean has to quicken his pace to keep up.

She makes straight for Ellen once they get close enough to hear her voice, and Dean gets left standing on the edge of the little group, awkward, staring. Sam half turns and double-takes as his eyes land on Dean, and for a moment the awkward silence between them drowns out the cafeteria noise.

It’s Sam who breaks it. “I didn’t think you’d come,” he says, quietly.

Dean just looks back at him for a moment, then looks down. “Yeah,” he admits. “Me neither.”

“Let me guess.” Sam almost-smiles, small and pained. “Bobby threatened to kick your ass so hard your grandkids would have bruises?” His voice sounds unsure, heavy with the two years of absence between them, like he’s not sure he’s allowed to say this kind of shit anymore.

Any other time, Dean wouldn’t be sure about that either. He’d have things to say—a lot of things to say. He probably still does. But Sam’s standing there right in front of him, Sam’s talking to him like he doesn’t actually hate that Dean’s here, and he can’t. Not right now.

He meets Sam’s eyes, lets his expression soften. “Something like that,” he says.

“Huh.” Sam pauses for a moment. “Well, I—”

The door opens.

The murmur of the crowd gets louder, and faces turn in their direction, necks craning as people wrench their attention away from the viewscreen for a second.

The heavy airlock door opens upward, and a white-suited figure ducks into the canteen. He’s wearing a cleaning suit—a precaution, because he’s not going any further than the airlock—but when he pulls off his helmet, Dean recognises his face. Victor Henriksen, Dad’s deputy. They’ve been working together for near enough a decade, now—since Dean was old enough to shadow in Mechanical and Dad left for the up tops. Dean’s met him a couple times, and judging by the way he nods to Sam, they’re on speaking terms.

Henriksen’s face is grim. He doesn’t look like a guy just doing his job. He looks like a guy burying a friend.

Somehow, that just makes Dean even angrier. It’s like Ellen’s pinched expression, even the way Sam’s just standing there. Like they’re not the ones enforcing this fucked-up law. Like they have no choice.

Henriksen turns to Ellen first. “Mayor,” he says. “We’re ready to go.”

Ellen closes her eyes and lets out a sigh. Mutters something under her breath than Dean can’t make out, but that makes Pam place a hand on her shoulder and give it a squeeze. Ellen looks up, then.

“Okay,” she says, too quiet for the finality of it. “Okay.”

It’s only then that Henriksen turns back to the rest of them. “Sam,” he says. “Dean. Look. I—”

“Save it,” Dean tells him savagely. “You tell me how sorry you are, I swear to God you’re gonna have to arrest my ass right here.”

Henriksen has the good grace to ditch his apology, at least. But, “You know we would’ve stopped it if we could,” he says. “We all would. If he hadn’t gone against the Order on record—”

“Screw the Order,” Dean says, “Chrissakes, _change_ the Order.” He turns to Ellen, feels his voice crack, turn pleading. “You guys are the goddamn authorities here, you’re his _friends_ —”

“Dean,” he can hear Sam saying behind him. “Dean, listen, it’s not—” But Dean isn’t listening to him, because then somebody else is calling his name.

He turns around, and there he is, looking over Henriksen’s shoulder.

Dad.

“Dean,” he says, his voice threading through the noise of the crowd and finding its way to Dean. It holds him there, immobilized. “Dean,” he says, again. “It’s okay, son. I’m gonna be fine.”

He’s smiling. There’s this light in his eyes, and Dean can only ever remember seeing him look like that once before. He was little, Sammy barely more than a baby. Mom hadn’t been dead a year, and that was when Dad found her papers.

Dean hadn’t understood what it meant, then. He’d been happy because Dad was happy; that was as far as it went. He hadn’t known that Dad was gonna disappear, or as good as. Spend hours sitting up late into the night after work, run off to the up tops for days on end, eventually take the job up there just so he could have access to the records of everybody sent to cleaning in the last fifty years. He hadn’t known that he and Sammy were gonna end up fending for themselves more often than not, that Bobby was gonna take care of them more often than Dad did, in the end. He’d just seen Dad smiling, for the first time since the night they came for Mom—and that had been enough.

Dad’s smiling at him now, and he doesn’t know what to say, how to make sense of it.

He just knows it’s not enough.

And then it’s too late. Dad’s pulling the helmet of his cleaning suit back on, raising a hand to wave goodbye, and Dean has no time to ask any of his questions, to say any of the things he’s carried up with him from the down deeps. The door shudders and begins to ascend, and the eyes of the crowd are turning back to the viewscreen.

They’re just gonna stand there and watch. For all the human drama unfolding in front of them, they’re just gonna watch.

Dean can’t do that. Maybe he thought he could come up here and act like it was a damn funeral, like Dad was already gone. Maybe he would’ve managed it if he hadn’t seen Dad’s face, hadn’t heard him speak. But he can’t. He just fucking can’t. The door closes, and the desperate finality of it breaks something in him, makes everything he’s been keeping dammed up since he heard the news come flooding out.

Before he even really knows what he’s doing, Dean’s throwing himself against the door.

“If none of you are gonna do anything,” he gets out, “I will.” It’s harsh in his throat, feels more like a gasp for breath than a statement.

He grabs the handles, heaves pointlessly at the door, hard enough that he wrenches something in his shoulder and winces in pain. It gives Henriksen a window to get in his way, steer him away from the door.

Dean fights him, snarls at the guy. “Get outta my way. Get out of my way, open that fucking door.” And then magic words occur to him. If he says them, they’re gonna have to stop it, right? Just for the moment, while they arrest him. Give him the chance to figure something out. There isn’t another set of words with more power here. “I want to go—”

“ _Dean_.” It’s Sam’s voice that stills him. Sam’s hand on his shoulder, Sam grabbing his arm and pulling him back from Henriksen and the door.

There are curious faces turning towards them, the commotion drawing attention back from the viewscreen, and it takes a full-strength Mayor Harvelle Death-Glare to quell the rising hum of voices.

“Dean,” Sam says again, softer. His eyes are wide, pleading, and suddenly it’s like every argument they’ve ever had in their lives, like the last two years never happened. “Dean. Please. There are things you don’t know. Don’t do this.”

Dean looks from Sam to the door and back in bewilderment. “You’re gonna tell me,” he says, and it comes out sounding like a question even though he doesn’t mean for it to be one.

“Yeah,” Sam says. “I’m gonna tell you everything. Promise.” He still has hold of Dean’s arm, like he’s afraid Dean is gonna make a break for the door again if he lets go. Dean knows he won’t, though. He feels winded. He’s fragmenting, up inside his head, scrabbling for pieces of what he knows and failing to make any fucking sense out of them. _There are things you don’t know_. And Dad’s smile.

He opens his mouth to demand an explanation, now, but then there’s a noise that feels like it should shake the cafeteria walls.

The outer door, opening.

Everything stops. Even Sam’s hand on his shoulder goes slack as all eyes turn to the screen. Dean could make a run for it now and nobody would stop him. He doesn’t. He’s as rooted to the spot as everybody else, and the viewscreen draws him in like a magnet.

After an agonizingly long moment, Dad appears in the bottom-right corner of the viewscreen. He emerges from the exit ramp slow, encumbered by the bulky cleaning suit—and then he stops dead, looking all around him. Dean’s heard it said that everybody does that, which is weird, because it isn’t like there’s much out there to see. Just rubble, dead ground, and dead people—lumps in the dusty earth that mark the spots where previous cleaners fell.

Dean’s eyes land on that dip in the ground, independent of anything his brain might be telling them to do. Mom. He wonders if Dad’s looking at the same spot. What he’s seeing, out there.

Dad seems to gather himself, then; takes a step forward and then another, lurches a little to his right.

Away from the viewscreen.

Dean’s heart thuds in his chest as a murmur ripples through the cafeteria. He was right. Dad isn’t going to clean.

Dad stops, then. He crouches, peers down at the dip in the ground. At something behind it. And Dean knows. But Dad doesn’t linger. He straightens up and starts forward, stepping over the _something_ like it’s nothing. He veers further away from the silo, making for the bank that circumscribes its view of _outside_. Stumbles over something Dean can’t see, but makes it to the foot of the bank and starts to climb.

Dean can’t help the tension that grips him, the catch of breath in his throat. Because—shit. What if—what if Dad’s okay? It’s been years since the last cleaning. Maybe things have changed. Maybe it’s finally safe out there. Maybe Dad’s gonna be the guy who finally gets to see _outside_ , for real.

He should be, Dean thinks. If there’s the slightest fucking ghost of a chance that it’s safe out there—Dad should be the one to find out about it. He’s dedicated his whole damn life to finding out, hasn’t he? Never had time for anything else. But if it’s true, if it’s true, then maybe that’s—not right, or just, or okay, but something. Something Dean can live with.

Dad is halfway up the bank when he stumbles.

He falls a couple feet, picks himself up and tries again. But he’s off-balance, now. Dean can see him struggling to get a foothold; hears Sammy suck in a breath beside him; Ellen mutter something that might be a curse or a prayer under her breath, a tremor in her voice.

Dad scrambles further up the bank. Stumbles again. And again.

This time he goes down.

This time he doesn’t get up.

There’s a flurry of movement visible, through the blur of the viewscreen; a cloud of dust goes up where he fell. But then he rolls back down the bank.

His body comes to rest at the foot of it, and there it stays.


	2. Chapter 2

 

Dean stares at the place where Dad fell. Just stares.

Somewhere, through the refrain of _no, no, no_ , that’s taken the place of his thoughts, he can hear confusion, surfacing in snatches around him. The voices demanding to know what’s gonna be done about the damn viewscreen, the _wow, I gotta tell everybody_ s. But it isn’t over. It can’t be over. Any minute now, Dad’s gonna get up, gonna show these fuckers that John Winchester has more important things to worry about than giving them a nice clear view of the outside world.

Nothing happens. Dean keeps on staring at that spot at the foot of the bank. His eyes hurt.

Somebody tugs at his arm.

“Dean. Come on.” Sam. There’s a querulous murmur rising off the crowd, rumblings of something ready to break out from under it. “Looks like things are gonna get ugly. I think we should go.”

Sam is still clutching the hand of the blonde girl whose name Dean doesn’t know yet, and she nods agreement. “Come on,” she says, tugging at his hand. “If we can just get out of the crowd, along the wall…”

Ellen and Henriksen are already pushing their way toward the raised platform in front of the still-grimy viewscreen. Ellen’s face is grim, but not panicked. She's resigned, her eyes set on the platform, her walk purposeful.

She has a speech prepared, Dean realises. She saw this coming. From the other side of the cafeteria he can see her daughter, Jo, heading straight for the platform to join them. Above them, the viewscreen stares back like an accusation.

Henriksen takes Pam by the shoulder, turns her toward Dean. “Here,” he says to her. “Go with these guys. Get out of here.”

“Sure thing, honey,” she tells him, then raises an eyebrow at Dean. “So, you sticking around for the stampede or are you gonna help a girl escape?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, “we’re going, we’re going,” and he tears his eyes away from the still form that used to be Dad and takes her arm.

 

 

 

 

 

Sam leads them back to Ellen and Jo’s quarters, and they sit around the table avoiding each other's eyes.

Without saying anything, Pam goes straight to the water heater and makes up some more of her special calming tea. Dean shakes his head when she offers him a cup, and Sam does too, so in the end Pam just pours one for herself and one for the blonde girl. She takes it gratefully, breathing in the steam as she steadies her hands, but she doesn’t look shaken for long. By the time the relief of their escape has worn off, her attention’s back on Sam. She takes his hand again, squeezes it while he sits silent.

Her name is Jess, and it turns out she’s been dating Dean’s brother for six months and Dean didn’t even know about it. Suddenly, he feels even less like he belongs up here.

Nobody says much, beyond the introductions. Sam stares straight in front of him, not at Dean, unseeing. And Dean—doesn’t know what the hell to say. The inside of his head whirls around the knowledge that Dad is gone, leaves him dizzy with it but refuses to find a place for it in what he knows about the world. It’s too much; he can’t hold it. But at the same time he feels like he’s been emptied out and pounded flat and tossed in the refuse, an empty container.

Dean doesn’t do serious conversations at the best of times, and the idea of talking about _this_ —it seems as impossible as breathing solid earth, as heading outside for a nice little stroll.

It’s Jess who breaks the silence, in the end. She squeezes Sam’s hand, gives him a sympathetic look. “Baby,” she says, “I know this is tough. But I really think you ought to tell your brother. You shouldn’t have to carry all of this by yourself.”

She doesn’t look in Dean’s direction, her eyes on Sam’s face as he does that twitchy grimace that means he’s working up to saying something emotional, and that usually has Dean running for the stairs.

Not this time. “All of what?” he demands, grabbing at the question like a lifeline. Sam hesitates. “Sam, what in the hell? What don’t I know?” He looks Sam in the eyes, hard, and doesn’t know if it’s a warning or a plea.

Sam opens his mouth to reply, and naturally, that’s when Ellen and Jo walk in. Dean holds his gaze, trying to convey with his eyes that they’re not done here. They’re having this conversation, whether Sam likes it or not.

Not that having it is gonna fix anything. Knowing what was going through Dad’s head before he went out there won’t bring him back. It’s just the best Dean’s got right now.

 

 

 

 

 

Ellen breaks into her private liquor stash soon as she gets through the door, never mind that it’s still morning. She’ll have to get back to answering questions sooner or later, but for now, Henriksen has the crowd situation under control, and somebody called Ash—one of her employees, Dean guesses, since everybody but him seems to know the name—is holding the fort in her office. According to Ellen, the mood’s cooled down a little out there, outrage at being deprived of the promised view tempered by the excitement of seeing someone refuse to clean. Never happened before; not once in silo history. People are gonna be talking about this for years to come.

Dean snorts into his cup, short and bitter. It figures. Not like the hivemind gives a shit that there’s a human being lying dead out there, someone with a family who are still breathing in here.

Sam shoots him a concerned look across the table. Dean ignores it. He ignores most everything else, too.

Henriksen shows up a little while later, plus a couple other people who Dean doesn’t know but who must work for Ellen. The glances that skate over him and Sam are cautious, and none of them speak to him directly. Not exactly surprising, after what happened earlier, and it suits Dean just fine. Ellen and Henriksen and the others exchange some clipped words, but pretty soon the others leave, and the conversation meanders off in different directions. There’s more liquor, and Ellen and Pam are leaning against the counter side-by-side, deep in conversation, and Sam and Jess look like they’re having some kind of a moment, and the whole thing has definitely devolved from crisis meeting to impromptu wake.

Dean’s the only one who stays silent. A drink is all the company he needs right now.

Jo wanders over, sometime between his fourth and fifth drinks. She doesn’t screw around with small talk—she sucks at that, which is something Dean normally appreciates—just looks levelly at him and says, “How’re you holding up?

He scowls at her. “I’m fucking awesome,” he says, and goes back to glowering into his cup.

She doesn’t take offence, but she doesn’t go away, either, and after a moment the weight of her expectant gaze gets to be more than Dean can stand. He stands abruptly, shoving his chair back with unnecessary force.

“Just—stop it,” he says. “Stop fucking—sympathizing at me. People keep doing it and they got no idea. Fuck.”

Jo doesn’t say anything to that. She just gives him this look, and waits for the pieces to drop into place, for him to figure out for himself what an asshole thing that was to say.

“Fuck,” he says, again, because apparently that’s the extent of his vocabulary right now. “Jo—you know I didn’t—”

“I know,” she says, with a tight little smile. She touches his arm and turns away.

Dean closes his eyes and sinks back against the wall. He oughta be grateful she didn’t kick his ass, and he guesses he is, in an abstract kind of way. But all he can feel is that same emptiness. It’s like all the other parts of him are under glass, like he knows they’re there, but he can’t touch them anymore.

Jo leaves him be, after that; maybe even spreads the word, because the others mostly avoid him, too.

Of course, Ellen’s another matter.

She just swoops on in, plucks the drink out of his hands and hustles him out into the corridor where it’s quiet, ignoring his protests.

Dean avoids her eyes. After a moment, she heaves a sigh, her shoulders sagging, looking at her hands. Dean lets himself look, then, and that’s when he notices—really notices—the shadows under her eyes and the new lines in her face. The way this whole thing is wearing on her.

Doesn’t change anything. She still didn’t stop it. She still didn’t save Dad.

Ellen catches his eye, then, and she straightens. “I know you’re angry,” she says. “And I am sorry for what your daddy did. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it.” Dean doesn’t reply, and she goes on. “But I’ve been thinking. About some of the things he said before he went _outside_. And I’m—well. I’m not saying I think he was right. But I ain’t sure he was crazy, either. John wasn’t stupid—he was the best Sheriff we’ve had in living memory. If the whole thing was a fool’s errand—he would’ve figured it out sometime or another.”

Dean just looks at her. “What’s your point?”

She crosses her arms. “My point is, I’m gonna need your help.”

Dean swallows. “My help?” he gets out, and his voice is harsh, feels dry in his throat. “I don’t believe this.” He scowls at her. “You say you don’t think Dad was crazy. Hell, maybe you didn’t, I don’t know. But everybody else did, and none of you gave a crap what was going on with him, just so long as he got his job done, kept everything running smooth. And then when it was too late, you sent him _outside_.” He blinks hard. “Did you ever even try to talk to him? And now you’re asking for my help? Why would I help any of you?”

Ellen crosses her arms, fixes him with a look, and even though Dean isn’t twelve years old anymore, it’s enough to quell his tirade, to make his stomach lurch in automatic anticipation of an ass-kicking. “ _Dean Winchester_ ,” she says, loud enough that the murmur of conversation in the kitchen quiets for a moment and he can picture heads turning towards the door. “ _You are in my home, and you will listen to what I have to say_.”

Dean deflates. Nods, waits for the noise next door to pick back up. For all the exasperation in her voice, the way Ellen’s looking at him—it isn’t unkind. She’s just at the end of her rope, same as he is.

Besides which, there’s too much that doesn’t add up here for Dean to walk away.

He grits his teeth. “Fine,” he says. “I’m listening.”

“Okay,” Ellen says. “Your daddy did a lot of poking around in silo history over the years. IT came and took his computer soon as they found out, but if I knew John, he kept copies somewhere. If there’s anybody can decipher them, it’ll be you and Sam.”

“Yeah.” Dean nods, his resentment overtaken, for the moment, by the possibility of answers. “Okay, yeah, I can try.” If that’s all she’s asking—well, he was gonna find out whatever he could anyway. It’s gonna be awkward, working with Sammy on this, but it’s _Dad_ —of course he’ll try. Who knows—maybe he’ll get some info out of Sam while he’s at it.

“I don’t know how much he made notes of,” Ellen warns. “But he noticed things. When he’d had a couple drinks, he’d let things slip sometimes. Talked about weird discrepancies in the system. I figured it was just his imagination at first. You go looking for suspicious, you’re gonna find it. But now, I’m not so sure.”

“You were sure enough to send him to cleaning.”

Ellen’s businesslike demeanour falters, just for a moment. “I tried to talk him out of it,” she says, quietly. “I really did.”

She says it with such total defeat, Dean finds his anger slipping away from him. It isn’t a sudden realisation that comes over him—it’s more like he’s been fighting it all day, and now he’s run out of strength and it’s won.

Dad’s smile. The stuff Sam hasn’t gotten around to telling him yet. “He wanted to go.”

The sad little smile Ellen turns on him is all the answer he needs.

She pulls herself together, then; puts her Mayor face on and gets back to business. “I can’t go looking into it myself,” she says. “People are gonna talk if I’m seen sticking my nose in the Sheriff’s office where it ain’t supposed to be.” She looks Dean in the eye. “So it’s a good thing Henriksen’s gonna need a deputy.”

Dean blinks at her, not catching on right away. Then his eyes go wide.

“The fuck?” he says. “Me? Deputy Sheriff? You been drinking too much of Pam’s special tea?”

Ellen holds his gaze. “Ain’t as crazy as it sounds,” she says. “You remember that trouble we had in the down deeps a couple years back, the section disputes? You and that friend of yours, what’s his name—?”

“Benny.”

“Benny, right. You guys really helped keep order, calmed people down. Things could’ve gotten violent, and they didn’t.” She sounds totally serious, like she’s actually thought about this before now. “That’s half the job. You’re an ordinary person, Dean. You’re from the down deeps. People on the lower levels will trust you, the way they don’t trust me or Victor. And _most_ of the time, you know how to keep a cool head.”

Dean shakes his head. “I’m just a mechanic, Ellen. There’s plenty of people more qualified for the job. Jody in the mids. She heads up Security down there. Benny, even. He’s got a decade on me, and _he_ ain’t related to the guy who just refused to clean.”

Ellen raises an eyebrow at him. “Boy, if you can convince Jody Mills she’d be happy in the up tops, you’ve got some kinda gift.” Then she pauses. “But I want to know what’s going on here. And I figure you want to know more’n I do.”

“I just don’t see people going for it. I mean, you wanna replace the guy with a vendetta because his wife got sent to cleaning with a guy whose parents both got sent to cleaning?” Dean frowns. “Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, and _I_ know I ain’t nuts.”

“You got a vendetta?” Ellen asks him, voice turning sharp.

“I got a reason to?” Dean counters, and she sighs again.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I really don’t know anymore.” Then she straightens, looks him right in the eye. “People can be persuaded to change their minds, Dean. If you let them get to know you, they’ll get to trust you. That ain’t my main concern right now.” She pauses. “Victor’s gonna be heading down to the mids in a week. Got a meeting with Jody. You want to take me up on my offer, you meet him there. Wish I could give you more time to think on it, but the head of IT has a man of her own she’s pushing for the job, and if we snooze, we’re gonna be stuck with Gordon Walker.” She makes a face.

“Walker? I’ve heard that name.”

Ellen nods. “He’s a traditionalist. Real hardass. Never put a foot out of line, nothing to be said against him—but I don’t like the guy.”

“Huh.” Dean swallows, hesitates. “I ain’t making any promises,” he says, at last. “But I’ll think about it.”

Ellen reaches up and squeezes his shoulder. “You do that,” she says. Then she inclines her head towards the doorway. “Start by talking to your brother.”

Sam has the decency to look embarrassed. Dean wonders how long he’s been standing there.

They look at each other for a moment. Sam ducks his head when Dean makes eye contact. But then when he glances up, Dean can’t hold his gaze, either. He scuffs his foot on the floor, stands there awkwardly.

“So,” he comes out with, at last. “You ready to spill the beans?”

Sam breathes out, heavy. “Yeah,” he says. “Jess was right. You deserve to know.”

He leans himself against the wall beside Dean, gazes off into space. His expression goes distant, and for a moment Dean wonders if he’s actually gonna get an answer at all.

Then: “Dad came to see me,” Sam says. “A couple weeks ago.”

Dean turns to look at him. His insides twist painfully, but all he says is, “Didn’t know you two were on speaking terms.”

“We weren’t,” Sam says. “He just showed up one night, out of the blue. Wanted me to break into some IT-access-only files for him. I said no.”

“Course you did.”

Sam goes still, but yeah, he’s exasperated now. Dean can tell by the twitchy thing his nostrils are doing. Well hey, things are already getting back to normal—or what’s been normal for the past couple years, anyhow.

“You have to understand, Dean,” Sam goes on, after a moment. “Some of the stuff he was saying—it was pretty out-there. He was kind of indirect about it, but it really seemed like he thought—it was safe. _Outside_. Like the viewscreen and the cleanings and everything were a lie.” He frowns. “I couldn’t see what that had to do with the files he wanted. IT supply records. I mean, what the hell, right?”

Dean inclines his head. “Yeah, I’d think that was kinda strange,” he has to admit. _But it was Dad_ , he doesn’t say. _I would’ve listened anyway._

Sam sighs, even though Dean’s kept his trap shut. Like he can just see Dean thinking it.

“Anyway,” he goes on. “I told him he should drop it. He was gonna get in trouble if he kept trying to access files he didn’t have clearance for. I mean, I know he didn’t mean to harm anyone, Ellen and Henriksen knew he didn’t. But who was gonna trust a Sheriff who couldn’t follow the Order himself?”

“So, let me guess,” Dean says. “Huge fight, you walked outta there and never saw him again?”

Sam’s face does something complicated. “Actually, he walked out. But he left something. A packet. _Paper_.”

“He kept paper copies of his notes?” Dean lets out a low whistle. “Okay, that is paranoid.”

“I haven’t made much sense of them yet,” Sam says. “I was too angry, I guess. Pissed at him for getting me involved. And then for—” He stops. “But I kept wondering. About the supply records. So I took a look myself.”

Dean tries to ignore the spark of hope that leaps up in him. “And?”

“And there is something weird. About the requisitions.”

“Weird how?”

“I don’t know yet.” Sam bites his lip, then turns and looks Dean in the eyes. “Actually, I was hoping you could help me with that.”

Ain’t that a surprise. Nobody’s bothered to tell Dean anything these last couple weeks, but now that he’s up here, they all want his help. Part of him still wants to turn tail, tell them all to go fuck themselves and run back to the down deeps.

But he’s gonna say yes. Because it’s about Dad, and it’s Sammy asking him, and even after all the crap they said to each other before Sam left, he’ll do anything. Of course he will.

“Help you how?” he asks.

“Heat tape.”

Dean stares at him. “What now?”

“Heat tape,” Sam says, again. “The stuff you use down in Mechanical—it’s straight from Supply, right?”

“Sure,” Dean says, still blinking at the left turn.

“And you’ve never had any problems with it?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“Good,” Sam says. Suddenly he’s all focus, has that look in his eye that reminds Dean of Dad, the way he used to get sometimes when he thought he’d gotten a breakthrough. “Send me some. Not to IT—tell the porters to bring it to my place, not to give it to anyone but me or Jess.”

“I can do that,” Dean says. “But what does it have to do with Dad? What did he find?”

“Maybe nothing. I don’t know yet. Just—trust me on this, Dean. Please?”

“Okay,” Dean says, after a moment. “Yeah, okay.”

Sam looks pained at his hesitation, frowns down at his hands for a moment before he speaks again.

“I didn’t know what he was planning,” he says, finally, his voice quiet. “You know that, right?”

Dean doesn’t look at him. “Right.”

“When I found out he asked to go outside—I tried to do something, I did. I spoke to Doctor Tran. I thought maybe she could refer him for psych evaluation, get him off with a suspension.” He sighs. “He refused to see her.”

“You spoke to the doctor.” Dean can’t help the bitterness that leaks into his voice. “You knew he asked to go outside. You talked to other people about it. It ever occur to you to tell me?”

Sam blinks back at him, eyes widening. “I—I just figured you knew,” he says. “I thought he would’ve told you first.”

Dean snorts. “Yeah, sure. I was his right-hand man.” He looks at his feet. “He hadn’t talked to me in months. Not even a message.”

“Dean—” Sam stops, shakes his head. “Never mind.” Then, softer: “He should’ve told you.”

“Yeah.” Dean ducks his head, feels the unhappy twist of his mouth. “Yeah, he should’ve.”

“Sam?” The door to Ellen’s kitchen opens, spilling light into the dim corridor. Jess’s head appears in the gap. “We better get going. Time for our shift.”

Sam glances at his wristwatch, eyebrows furrowing. “Shit,” he says. “Ruby’s gonna have my head if I’m late.”

Jess doesn’t say anything, but the briefest little shadow crosses her face at the name. Sam turns to Dean.

“Don’t forget,” he says. “Heat tape. I’ll be in touch.”

“Sure,” Dean says, and Sam and Jess bustle back into the chatter-filled kitchen to say their goodbyes.

The door closes behind them, momentarily shutting off the light. Dean rests his head against the corridor wall and closes his eyes.

He doesn’t feel sure of anything anymore.

 

 

 

 

 

Ellen insists that Dean and Pam stay in her quarters that night. He protests—he has work to do, can’t afford the vacation chits—but she whacks his arm and tells him that Bobby Singer will spare a man for one night at the request of the Mayor, or she’ll climb to the down deeps herself and make him regret it.

Honestly, the long, mindless tramp down the stairs sounds pretty good. More moving, less talking, less thinking. But Dean’s had enough to drink that his head is swimming a little, and he’s not sure he can face being alone with Pam to talk to right now. He doesn’t know what he thinks about the whole fucked-up situation himself, much less feel like sharing, and Pam has a way of asking the kinds of questions that break you open, when she thinks you need it. There’s no hiding shit from her. And this shit—Dean doesn’t want it up in the light, not right now.

Which is why he’s lying sleepless on Ellen’s couch, his bare feet sticking out over the end, trying to tune out Ellen and Pam’s conversation from the next room.

Even with a pillow jammed over his head to muffle the sound, sleep doesn’t come.

Dean turns over, kicks the blanket off, then pulls it back up over himself. He stares at the ceiling. He closes his eyes one last time; tries to blot out the image of Dad’s grainy figure on the viewscreen, stumbling and falling to the bottom of the bank, one last time.

He’s still wide awake. His heartbeat thumps, loud enough that it feels like it could be the only sound in the whole of the silo, loud enough to wake all the sleeping levels up top. With his eyes closed, Dean can almost imagine he’s the one out there in the cleaning suit. The claustrophobia of it, a helmet the only thing shielding him from a toxic world, making the blood pound in his eardrums.

He lets out a sigh and sits up. Drops his head into his hands.

A moment later, he’s up again, rummaging in his pack. He comes out with the radio he brought up from Bobby’s workshop.

Yeah. That’s what he needs—same thing that always keeps him going when the insomnia bites. Something to fix.

He switches on the lamp, spreads his crap out on the table and gets to work, trying to shrink his world to the components in front of him, to blot out all the important stuff he’s so helpless to change, just for now.

The antenna’s damaged. He couldn’t see that last night in the dark of the landing, but now he removes it, finds a spare in among the components he snagged out of the delivery downstairs. It takes him a couple minutes to get it affixed—but when he does, he hears a crackle, same as he did last night. The sounds in it are clearer, this time.

Dean lifts the radio to his ear and listens. And hears words.

_…trying…me?...who is this?..._

The voice is thick with static, grainy as Dad’s image walking away on the viewscreen. But it’s there, sure as anything. It’s kind of comforting, quiet as it get up here, to be reminded that somebody else in the silo’s awake at this shit-awful hour of the night.

Not a voice he recognises, so it can’t be anybody from Mechanical, or any of Ellen’s people. Security somewhere in the mids? One of Jody’s people, maybe?

Dean clears his throat. “Hey,” he says into the silence. “Hey, you read me?”

Nothing for a moment. Then: _…Yes? Who is this?_

“I’m, uh.” Dean breaks off, figuring again that it would be a bad idea to give his family name. Last thing he wants to do right now is spill his guts about Dad to some stranger who just knows about the cleaning-that-wasn’t via the rumor mill. “I’m Dean. Up on Two.”

It’s crazy, he knows, but he could swear the crackle of static sounds surprised.

The voice when it comes, though, is low and level. It’s a nice voice. Rough, like the owner has a serious liquor habit, but steady and solemn—stern, even, in a way that might make Dean sit up and take notice, if this was some other day, if he had any fucks left to give.

The voice says, _Hello, Dean._

“That’s my name, don't wear it out,” Dean says, and waits for the voice to volunteer its own, but it doesn’t.

A wash of white noise, and for a moment he thinks he’s lost the signal again. It sounds patchy, fading in and out, like he’s out of range of the feeder cable. Only nowhere in the up tops is out of range.

“Hey, he says into the radio. “You still there?”

 _Yes. I’m still here._ The voice sounds—he doesn’t know, really. Not exactly nervous. Just—like it wasn’t expecting to be spoken to.

Maybe he’s stumbled onto a private channel, one used for sending info—sometimes just gossip, usually something more illicit—up and down between the levels without section heads or Security listening in. Some kind of black market shit.

But if that was it, then surely the guy would just have shut it down already? Safer than risking chitchat with a stranger.

Dean frowns to himself. “So, man,” he says, “where you at?”

 _Twenty-One_ , the voice says, and yeah, it definitely sounds puzzled now. _Where else would I be?_

Twenty-One. That’s IT. Dean’s first instinct is hey, maybe this guy knows Sam. Something keeps him from asking the question, though. He doesn’t wanna draw unknown attention to himself or Sam right now, and sure, that’s part of it. But also—something just doesn’t seem right.

He always thought IT had pretty tight-ass security. No way would anybody be allowed to take a handheld radio in there, let alone go talking to random people from outside the section on their shift.

He’s searching his brain for a safe topic when it occurs to him that somebody working a nightshift right now could’ve been up in the cafeteria this morning. Probably was. An event as big as a cleaning, within climbing distance? It’s gonna be the main topic of conversation everywhere, whatever Ellen said to the crowd this morning. For days, probably.

For a moment, Dean stays quiet. He doesn’t wanna bring that shit up if he can help it—but then he thinks it’d be worse to have somebody start in on the gossip all casual, like he’s just some stranger.

“So,” he says, cautious. “You been working all day? Long shift, huh?”

Yes, the voice says, its own note of caution echoing right back at him.

“So you missed the cleaning this morning?”

A beat, and then, _What are you talking about? There hasn’t been a cleaning in decades._

The voice sounds confused more than anything—not like it’s laughing at him.

But “Fuck you,” breaks out of Dean before his brain has time to engage. “Fuck you, that ain’t funny, that was my _father_.”

Anger frays his words, his voice coming out like it’s been dragged out the discards pile, all rust and jagged edges. It _hurts_ , saying it, enough that it takes a moment for the realisation of his own stupidity to kick in.

The voice doesn’t respond right away. Maybe Dean’s scared the guy off. Maybe it’s already gotten around the silo that the whole Winchester family is bugfuck crazy—so much for Ellen’s bright idea, in that case.

But then the voice comes again.

 _Your father was sent to cleaning?_ It speaks slow and careful, like the guy doesn’t know what to do with that fact. Shit, Dean could almost believe he really didn’t know about it. _I’m sorry._

The fuck of it is, he sounds genuine, the way no stranger could be. Every other fucker in the silo has something to gain from a cleaning, if they care at all. Even the sorries from coworkers—save Benny and Bobby—and from passing acquaintances have been muted, mumbled with averted eyes. Because Dad must’ve done something to be sent out there, right? And it’s been a long time since we had a clear view of _outside_ , and we’re all curious, so maybe we’re not all _that_ sorry.

This isn’t like that.

So maybe the guy’s a nut, not screwing with him. Maybe he’s some kind of a shut-in, locked away in an office or a workshop on some neglected level, eyes for nothing but his work, no idea what’s happening around him. Dean’s heard of people getting like that, sometimes, though he’s never met one of them.

(Dad used to say it was the silo that did it. That if they lived above ground, like the Ancients did, that kind of shit wouldn’t happen. Dad used to say that and then Sam would yell at him to _shut up, someone might hear you_ , with wide, shocked eyes. Then Dean would end up stuck in the middle of another fight, whoop de fucking do.)

But then if this guy is one of those people, what's he doing listening to strangers’ voices on the radio in the middle of the night?

It’s a mystery. Though, by the standards of Dean’s life right now, a pretty benign one.

There’s a noise on the other end, then. Like a door opening, maybe another voice, and he hears, _Yes, just a moment_ , muffled, like his mystery shut-in is speaking from behind his hand.

A beat, and then, clearer, _I have to go._

Strange, but Dean feels a twinge of disappointment at that.

Or maybe not so strange. God knows he’s been in need of a distraction from the shitshow his world has turned into in the space of a few short days. Speaking to somebody who has nothing to do with that crap—even if he might be fifteen kinds of crazy—it’s steadying, in a way he didn’t expect. His head feels clearer.

“Huh,” Dean says. “Okay. Night, uh—?”

 _Castiel_ , says the voice. _My name is Castiel._

“Right.” It isn’t a name Dean’s ever heard before, and he shortens it without really thinking. “Night, Cas,” he says. “Maybe we’ll talk again sometime.”

They probably won’t. He has bigger things to worry about. Still, it makes things seem that little bit more normal, maintaining the pretence. Like he has any semblance of a life outside the current carnival of crazy.

There’s a pause on the other end.

 _Maybe we will_ , the voice—Cas—says, at last. Maybe it’s Dean’s imagination, but he sounds like he’s a little surprised by the idea himself.

Then, radio silence.


	3. Chapter 3

 

Three days since the cleaning-that-wasn’t, which is what most of the silo seem to be calling it when they think Dean isn’t listening. He kind of hates that he’s adopted it, only it’s an easier way of thinking about it than _three days since Dad went_ outside _and didn’t come back_ , or _three days since Dad was sent to cleaning_. Or, _three days since Dad died_.

Three days, and Dean still can't say whether or not he’s gonna take Ellen up on her offer.

He hasn’t talked to anybody about it. He hasn’t talked much at all, since he got back down to Mechanical. He’s kept his head down, stayed busy after hours fixing up all kinds of crap—stuff that everyone complains about all the time but nobody ever gets around to dealing with. The backup generator isn’t making that whining noise anymore, the busted lightbulb in the break room has been replaced, and the wobbly railing at the bottom of the staircase isn’t wobbly anymore.

After he ran out of odd jobs, Dean tried switching the radio on again a couple times, just for something to do. He was pretty sure he had it working okay, that night at Ellen’s, but he hasn’t heard any sign of Cas—or anybody else—since.

He shouldn’t care. He knows that, but finds himself thinking about it anyway, because as far as things to think about go, it’s the least shitty option he has.

Besides which, some of the stuff Cas said has stuck with him, turning up somewhere in the churn of his thoughts at odd moments. _There hasn’t been a cleaning in decades_. That's crazy shit. Yeah, okay, before Dad, it had been a few years, but anyone who’s grown is old enough to remember the last couple.

Karen Singer. Bill Harvelle.

Mary Winchester.

Dean tamps down on his sorrow. He tries to think about the practical side of things, get them into some kind of order in his head. Some shut-in not knowing about the cleaning, that’d be one thing. But Cas stated so confidently that there hadn’t been any, like it was a fact _Dean_ should’ve known. He sounded so puzzled by the contradiction, so sincere. Dean finds it hard to believe the guy was fucking with him.

Right now he’s in Bobby’s workshop, tinkering again, tuning out the muffled sound of Bobby ripping some poor shadow a new one for screwing up a simple repair. The radio hisses quietly in the background. Dean switches channels, gets a crackle of nothing, and sets it down in resignation just as Benny sticks his head in through the door.

“Coming for a drink, brother?” he says, casual, his eyes only resting on Dean’s face a moment too long.

It’s the closest thing to, _You wanna talk about it?_ he's likely to get from anyone in Mechanical, and when Dean shakes his head and says, “Nah, I’m beat,” Benny just nods his head and withdraws, doesn’t push him.

He’d listen, if Dean wanted to talk about his shit. So would Lisa, or Bobby, or Pam.

If Sam were here, he’d be on Dean’s ass to talk to _somebody_ about it, hold hands and get his kumbaya on. But the whole thing is big and messy and overwhelming enough when it’s just inside of his head, never mind if he brought it out into the light—and anyway, it’s his problem to deal with. His friends have crap of their own. Dean isn’t about to drag them into the whole shitshow that’s going on upstairs, start whispering sedition in their ears, implicate them by association.

So he keeps busy and keeps quiet, and everyone else knows— _God_ knows—he has his reasons for being in a level-high funk, and if they don’t know exactly what those reasons are, it doesn’t matter. He keeps quiet anyway.

Outside, the sound of the daytime shift clearing up: putting away tools, changing out of oil-stained coveralls, bitching. Someone complains about _this crappy batch of heat tape that doesn’t last worth shit_ ; someone else groans, _Nights all next week, dude, who’d I piss off to deserve this?_

Dean turns up the volume on the radio. Still no voice. Static swallows the noise from the hallway, and Dean almost doesn’t hear the door of the back room opening and then closing again, the wheels of Bobby’s chair on the workshop floor.

“What’s on your mind, boy?” Bobby says, behind him.

Dean scowls. “What do you _think_ ’s on my mind?”

Which would be enough to make anyone else back off, but Bobby just looks at him. Bobby can give shit back as good as he gets, but when he needs to be, he’s immune to it, letting it run off him like oil. “Well, ain’t that the question?” he says.

Dean’s scowl deepens. “What's that supposed to mean?”

Bobby looks right through him. “Thought I knew what to expect from you, when you came back down here. Hell, I was prepared. But you ain’t gotten into a single fight since you got back. You ain’t once been drunk enough Benny’s had to scrape you off the floor, and that girl of yours is still talking to you.”

“Lisa’s not _my girl_ ,” Dean objects—because yeah, they have fun, but she can do better than him and one day she will. Bobby ignores his attempt at changing the subject, watching him with crossed arms.

“You’re different,” he says. “And that worries me.”

“What?” Dean says. “You’re worried because I’m _not_ acting like a fuckup?”

Bobby sighs. “You don’t see it, do you?”

“See what? Bobby, I ain’t got time for this crap.”

Bobby raises an eyebrow and surveys the mess on the workbench, the radio lying amid the debris, next to Dean’s hand. But all he says is, “You’re starting to remind me of your old man.” A pause. “The way he used to get before he did something real stupid.”

The look in his eye—yeah, he’s not gonna let this one go anytime soon. Dean sags where he sits. He’s gonna have to throw Bobby something to reassure him he isn’t about to do anything apocalyptically dumb.

“Ellen and I talked,” he admits, after a moment.

“You know there’s nothing she coulda done.” Bobby looks grave. “She’s bound by the Order just like the rest of us.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “But that ain’t it. She asked me—you know Henriksen’s Sheriff now, right?”

Bobby inclines his head. “Good man.”

Dean grits his teeth. “So I’m told. But Ellen wants me to be his deputy.”

At that, Bobby does look surprised. But, “I can see why,” he says, after a moment. “Same as I can see why not. But what made her think you were gonna go for it?”

“Following in Dad’s footsteps, I guess?” Dean shrugs, but the lie comes out easy enough, and if Bobby doesn’t buy it, he isn’t telling. “But I dunno.” He shakes his head. “People aren’t just gonna distrust me because of who Dad is—” He breaks off. “Was. They’re _pissed_ because he didn’t clean. They’re gonna be pissed at me, too. And at Ellen, for bringing me in. I just—I don’t get it. I don’t see how it’s gonna work.” He looks at his hands, sighing. “Jesus, I’m just a mechanic anyway. What does she want with me on this job?”

“ _Just_ a mechanic?” Bobby turns sharp eyes on him. “Trained you myself, didn’t I?”

Dean lets out a breath, not quite a laugh. “Fine, fine. I’m the best damn mechanic in the business. Happy?”

The briefest of smiles, and then Bobby’s serious again. “Ellen Harvelle ain’t dumb,” he tells Dean. “If she’s willing to risk all the crap you’re gonna get to have you up there, then she’s got her reasons.”

He doesn’t say any more, but he doesn’t have to. He knows there’s more to this. He has to. Dean can see it.

Still, he hesitates a moment before risking it.

“What if,” Dean says, and then stops. “Well, what if Dad—if there was something to it? I’m not saying he was right to go _outside_ , I’m not. But just. Something.”

Bobby looks at him, lets out a sigh, and for a moment he looks tired, looks every one of his years and then some.

Then, his expression hardens. “I don’t think I heard that,” he says.

Dean tries to ignore the sinking feeling in his gut, the flip-flop of disappointment. “Wasn’t anything,” he says, and holds his gaze steady under Bobby’s assessing look.

“Good,” Bobby says, and manoeuvres his chair around to make for the door.

But he stops before he leaves. “I hate to lose you as a mechanic, boy,” he says. “But I got plenty other idiots to train up. Just so long’s we don’t lose you for real.” The hard look in his eyes has given way to sorrow. “Don’t do anything dumb.”

Dean opens his mouth to protest—that he hasn’t made his mind up yet, that Bobby needs to stop talking like he’s already quit—but then Bobby’s out the door, and it thunks closed behind him. Dean rests his elbows on the table, drops his head into his hands, and stays there.

He’s still sitting like that a half-hour later, almost wishing he’d gone for that drink with the others, because maybe he isn’t much for company right now but he could definitely use the liquor.

That’s when he hears the radio crackle. It’s been just sitting there, inert, for long enough he forgot the thing was switched on.

But there’s a hiss of white noise, and then a voice saying _…Hello?..._

It takes Dean a moment to surface out of his silence, for his head to be clear enough to answer. “…Cas?” he says, at last. “Castiel? That you?”

 _Yes_.

The guy actually sounds relieved, which is weird. If he’s using a private frequency for no-good reasons, then some random stranger listening in on it should be the last thing he wants. And if he’s just some shut-in, why would he want to talk to anybody? Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

Maybe he’s been hiding away so long that talking to some voice he doesn’t know on the other side of a radio link is easier than meeting people face-to-face. That must be it. It’s about the only thing that makes sense.

But Dean remembers his weirdo comments from the other day, that _hasn’t been a cleaning in living memory_ stuff, and a tickle of suspicion at the back of his mind won’t leave him alone.

He clears his throat. “So,” he says, at last, “What were you doing talking to me the other night? I thought IT were pretty strict about you guys screwing around on your shifts up there.”

For a moment, Cas doesn’t say anything. When he does, it’s just, _You ask a lot of questions._

Dean’s half-expecting the deflection. Straight answers seem to be thin on the ground these days. He’s getting used to it.

“Yeah, well,” he says. “I _have_ a lot of questions.”

_Why?_

It sounds like plain curiosity, nothing accusatory in it, and maybe that’s why, for once, Dean doesn’t find himself getting antsy or suspicious, like every logical impulse tells him he should. Or maybe it’s just that he’s really fucking tired of hiding things.

Maybe it’s just that he’s really fucking tired, period.

Either way, he slumps forward over the radio, sighs, and after a moment, he says, “You ever wonder if—” He hesitates, reaching for a way of saying this that doesn’t sound like obvious sedition. Plausible deniability. “If this is all there is?”

A pause, and then, _Sometimes._

Cas says it slowly, cautious. Which he should be; it’s a startling admission, especially made to a total stranger. Dean could be Security, for all he knows. Hell, maybe he will be, if he goes along with Ellen’s plan. He’d have to report this, if he was, and the thought is a tickle of unease in the back of his brain.

Hearing someone else admit to doubt, though—admit it without asking anything of him—it’s a relief, in a way he wasn’t expecting, and it breaks something loose inside of him.

“My dad had questions,” he says. “I think maybe he had answers, too. And he was sent to cleaning three days ago, and now I’ll never fucking know.” His palm slams against the top of the workbench and it startles him. He doesn’t expect the savagery in his voice.

 _You’re angry with him_ , Cas says. Not a question.

“Well, no shit,” Dean says, but actually, yeah, it’s more than he’s dared to admit to himself until now. He isn’t just angry at Dad for dying. It’s more selfish than that. “He coulda told me,” he says, quiet, after a moment. “He coulda trusted me.”

_And now you need to know whether he was right._

Yeah. Dean doesn’t know exactly what it is he needs to prove—to himself, to the silo, to Dad, to whothefuckever—but he knows that he’s gonna do it. Try to do it, at least. Bobby was right, earlier, when he spoke as though Dean had already made his decision. He’d made it the second Dad walked out that damn airlock.

“Sure,” he says, his mouth twisting in an unhappy smile. “You got any pointers on finding out?”

He hears Cas take a breath on the other end of the link, imagines that he’s hesitating. But when his voice comes over the radio again, it’s firm—like he’s made a decision, too.

_I don’t know what your father thought, he says. What he believed was on the outside. I have never been there. But there is one thing I can tell you._

“So? Spill.”

 _I’m not on Level Twenty-One_. Cas pauses. _I’m in Silo Twenty-One._

Dean gapes. Then he frowns. "Quit screwing with me," he says. "That's impossible. Everyone knows this is the only—"

But there are muffled voices on Cas's end of the connection, and then there's nothing but dead air.

 

 

 

 

“Morning, brother. This came for you.”

Dean pokes his head out from behind the generator panel where he’s working—by a definition of ‘working’ that mostly means ‘hiding from Bobby’, because he’s been about as much use as a glass hammer all day—to see Benny proffering a folded piece of paper. Not just a tiny scrap, like most people use for sending messages up and down between the levels; a whole sheet of it. A day’s chits’ worth, probably. Not something you see often, down here, and it’s enough to jolt Dean out from the endless loop of his thoughts, at least for a moment.

 _Meeting with Mills on One-Twenty tomorrow_ , reads the note. _Be there if you’re coming. VH_

Benny’s still looking at him, one eyebrow cocked.

Dean doesn’t share. Yesterday, he was on the verge of spilling, and he’ll have to tell the rest of Mechanical he’s leaving soon enough. But after Cas’s revelation—because that’s what it feels like, even though Dean knows he should be dismissing it as a fucked-up joke or a seditionist lie—he doesn’t know exactly what he’s planning on going hunting for. Another silo. The idea's so crazy he shouldn't even be able to take it seriously. He knows—he's always known—the people here are the last people on Earth. There's nobody else out there. Only he can't manage to write it off as nonsense like he should. It makes him leery of talking, like he’d be confessing to something he doesn’t completely understand yet.

So he just fumbles in the pockets of his coveralls for a stub of pencil and scrawls a reply under Henriksen’s neat handwriting. “The porter still here?” he asks.

“Sure.” Benny indicates the corridor that leads towards the staircase with a lazy movement of his head. “Need me to take over for you here?”

“Thanks.” Dean ducks out from behind the panel, wiping his hands off on his coveralls. Then a thought occurs to him. “Hey, you got any spare heat tape?”

“Sure, help yourself.” But then Benny frowns at the panel. “What you been using it for?”

“Uh, not this. It’s for something else.”

Benny nods in the direction of Bobby’s workshop. “Side-project, huh?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

Dean makes a detour over to Benny’s workspace before he goes to hand over his reply, cuts off a strip of heat tape the length of his forearm. Hopefully that’s as much as Sam is gonna need. There’s a whole lot of it in the discards pile, too, and he frowns as he remembers that he’s heard more than one person bitching about it disintegrating on them over the past couple days. They got a new batch in this morning, and he hasn’t heard any complaints since. Half the crappy batch is still sitting there unused, in an open, unmarked container. Supply hadn’t even bothered to mark up the contents on the box.

Hey, it can’t hurt. The more data they have, the better, right?

Least, Dean hopes so. He picks a second strip out the discards pile, tears a scrap off the bottom of Henriksen’s note, and scribbles an explanation for Sam before bundling up the whole lot.

The porter he finds waiting near the staircase is a shadow, a tiny slip of a girl who can’t be more than fourteen.

“Hey, kid,” Dean says.

She scowls at him from under her messy bangs. “Krissy.”

“Sure.” He hands over the note. “I need you to take this up to Dep—to Sheriff Henriksen. You got that?”

“Yeah.” She takes it from him, scowl never wavering.

“And this one—” Dean produces the package with the heat tape. “—is for Sam Winchester, up in IT. _Only_ for him, you understand? I want you to put it in his hands. Don’t leave it at the front desk, don’t give it to anybody else, not even if the Head of IT asks you for it herself.”

The porter kid—Krissy—gives him an unimpressed look. “I don’t have time to hang around waiting for one person to show up.”

“He’ll be there.”

“My caster’ll kick my ass if I don’t make time.”

Dean rolls his eyes, reaches into the back pocket of his coverall. “Fine,” he says. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

Krissy’s smiling brightly when she darts back up onto the staircase with half a day’s worth of Dean’s chits tucked into her coverall. “Pleasure doing business with you,” she calls out, and Dean glowers at her.

Once she turns her back, he cracks a smile. Enterprising kid.

His smile doesn’t last. He heaves a sigh. Gathers himself up, does his best to mentally prepare for the biggest verbal ass-kicking he’s gotten since he was a shadow, and makes for Bobby’s workshop.

 

 

 

 

Dean heads around to Lisa’s before he goes back to his own quarters. He hasn’t seen a whole lot of her since the cleaning-that-wasn’t, which he feels kind of bad about, but he thinks he’d probably feel worse if he hung around unloading his crap on her and Ben.

(He never did bring Ben that tomato. Maybe he’ll get around to fixing that sometime. He doubts it though. The whole idea just feels too normal for what his life is right now.)

Bobby didn’t dish out the ear-bashing he was expecting, and the kind of cheerful shit-talking that’s par for the course when somebody leaves Mechanical—let alone for the up tops—has been muted. No time for a goodbye drink, or for anybody to hide his clothes or sneak anything stinky into his locker. Benny did take him aside before they left for the day, said something, briefly serious, about always having a place to come back to down here. Echoes of what Bobby had told him earlier in the day, and Dean hadn’t really known what to say to any of it, so he just muttered his thank-yous and ducked his head and left.

It’s left him feeling strange. Light and untethered, like his insides have been scooped out and he doesn’t know yet what he’s gonna replace them with.

He raps at Lisa’s door, stands there frowning to himself until she opens up.

“Dean!” she says, beaming. The megawatt smile she wears most of the time only dims down a little when she registers that he’s still in his work coverall, still smeared in grease. “I guess you’re not staying?”

“I can’t,” he says, not meeting her eyes. “I have to—” He breaks off, looks up, forces himself to hold her gaze. So he has a whole lot of crap on his plate right now. Doesn’t mean Lisa deserves to have him act like a douche. “You know, when I went to the up tops?” he starts again.

Lisa nods. “Not exactly easy to forget.” She reaches out like she wants to put her hand on his arm, but she aborts the movement before it gets there and folds her arms around herself instead.

“I spoke to Ellen,” Dean goes on. “She—shit, I’m sorry, I shoulda told you this stuff already, I know. But she offered me a job. And I’m taking it.”

Lisa frowns a little—but it’s puzzlement, not anger. Dean doesn’t know if he was expecting anger.

He doesn’t know if he was expecting anything, come to think of it. Not like he’s been paying much attention to the people around him, the past few days. Maybe he deserves it for that alone, for getting buried so deep inside his head that he forgot to care if other people cared.

But then Lisa brightens. “That’s great,” she tells him. “I’m happy for you. What made you think I wouldn’t be?”

Dean forces a smile. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

“So, when do you start?”

“Uh.” He lets the smile drop off of his face; shuffles where he stands. “That’s the thing. It’s just a couple days. I gotta get going—uh, first thing, actually.”

“Okay, so you’re definitely not staying tonight.” Her cheery expression falters, just a little, but she still doesn’t get mad. Who the hell knows why, but Dean finds himself feeling a little disappointed by that. Lisa just looks at him, though—steady, like maybe she’s figured out there’s more going on here than he’s saying—and stands up on her toes to kiss his cheek. “Stay in touch,” she says. “And Dean—be careful.”

“You know me.” He grins at her, but can’t make it reach his eyes.

Lisa doesn’t say anything to that. When he turns to look back, halfway down the corridor, she’s still watching him, and her expression is troubled.

 

 

 

 

Dean showers, hesitates before folding up his coverall and stuffing it into the bottom of his pack.

It’s weird, thinking that the day after tomorrow, he’s gonna be exchanging Mechanical blue for Sheriff’s Office beige. It feels like a kind of betrayal.

Hell, maybe that’ll help him fit in up there. Seems like the whole truth is pretty damn unfashionable these days.

He doesn’t have a whole lot else to pack. Clothes, the radio, a couple keepsakes he’s kept shoved in the bottom of a drawer and hasn’t really looked at since Sam went up to shadow in IT. It doesn’t take him long. He crawls under the covers to get some shut-eye and finds he can’t get comfortable, turning over restlessly as, one by one, he hears the footsteps of the other men and women on his corridor pass by his door and turn in for the night. He finds himself wishing he’d stayed at Lisa’s after all, or just gotten good and drunk before he turned in.

Dean gives up on trying to sleep around four, figures he’ll make an early start. It’s quiet in the residential corridors, but the muffled hum and clatter of machinery from Mechanical never stops being audible. It’s the background noise of Dean’s existence, one of the things that makes him feel like he’s at home, its absence one reason he never sleeps well when he’s out of the down deeps.

He’s gonna have to get used to it.

That, or he’s gonna have to get used to not sleeping. Which might just be the likelier option.

He’s ready to close the door behind him and head up when an impulse takes hold of him. Tomorrow night he’s gonna be most of the way up the silo, camping out with Henriksen. Not gonna have much opportunity to turn on his radio and talk to his possibly-crazy, possibly-world-altering voice on the other end.

And he feels like he ought to tell Cas. That he’s decided. That maybe, just maybe, he believes him.

Dean sits back on his bed and turns the radio on, flips to the channel they’ve been speaking on. Hears the familiar staticky hiss. Freezes as he hears footsteps stumble down the corridor towards the head, and stays there, silent, hyper-aware of the sound of his own breathing, until they come back the other way.

Jumpy, afraid of being overheard by a half-asleep co-worker—he’s starting to act like a criminal, when he’s about to go take on a job upholding the law.

A criminal, or a seditionist. Or Dad.

Dean swallows, finally speaks into the radio. “Hey,” he says, softly. “Cas. You there?”

A beat. And then, _Oh-ho, what have we here?_ says a voice that definitely doesn’t belong to Cas.

Dean slams the ‘off’ button and shoves the radio away like it just bit him. His heart races. He finds himself staring at the door, waiting, with the sick certainty of nightmare, for boots to appear in the line of light underneath it, fists to pound on it, feet to kick it down and masked figures to rush in and drag him away, drag him away like they did Mom.

They don’t come.

When Dean can breathe again, he stands up, grabs for his pack. He stares at the radio for a long moment before stuffing it back in among his other possessions and heading out the door.

 

 

 

 

By the time Dean makes it up to One-Twenty, Henriksen and Jody are locked away in her office, having—as far as Dean can see through the tiny window—what looks like an intense discussion over a nearly-empty pot of coffee. On automatic, he goes to take a seat outside, ready to wait until they’re done, but a woman in Security orange who Dean doesn’t recognise waves him through.

Both Jody and Henriksen look up as the door opens, the thread of their previous conversation cutting off abruptly..

Jody smiles at him. Henriksen nods and says, “Winchester,” not exactly hostile but not exactly friendly either, and motions for him to take a seat.

Dean does. Jody tips the dregs of the coffee into a mug and slides it over to him, and when he takes it he looks down at his hands and realises they’re clenched tight. Even after his climb, he can feel himself vibrating with tension; has the unnerving sense that they’ll be able to see it if they just look at him hard enough. The sense that he’s interrupted some conversation he wasn’t supposed to be privy to doesn’t help.

He wraps both hands around his mug and wills himself to relax. So what if they were talking about him? It doesn’t mean anybody’s overheard his late-night chats with Cas. It doesn’t mean they know.

Whoever that other voice belonged to didn’t call Security on him. That suggests that Cas is involved in some shady black-market shit—in which case, he and whoever he’s working with have nothing to gain from getting the authorities involved.

Or he’s telling the truth. There really is another silo out there, and Cas is in it.

Which is tough to get his head around, but doesn’t mean Dean’s about to get hauled in and sent to cleaning. So maybe Henriksen and Jody were talking about him. He’s gonna have to get used to that. If he was in Henriksen’s place and the Mayor was trying to palm some messed-up civilian off on him as second-in-command, he’d be complaining, too. He’s gotta stop being so damn paranoid.

Dean does his best to keep up with the conversation. For the most part, it’s what he guesses must be standard stuff. Incidents; patrol times; the possibility of hiring a couple extra people to work with Jody down here.

From what they say, it seems like they’re expecting an uptick in unrest, especially with the Mayoral election coming up and nobody sure whether Ellen’s gonna go for another term. Conflict between levels and sections is just a fact of life. Somebody always feels like they’re being screwed over, or like somebody else is getting more than they deserve. But there are more grumblings than usual right now, more than there have been at any time since Ellen was voted in. Black market activity is on the up, too; supplies going missing, being found sold for profit on other levels weeks later. They’re having trouble keeping track of the perpetrators.

Neither Henriksen nor Jody looks like they’re expecting Dean to have anything to say. Which, yeah, he gets it; if he was any greener, they’d be getting him set up with hydroponics and not an office. But he can’t keep his trap shut when they’re missing the obvious solution.

“They’re using illicit radio frequencies,” he points out. “You need to monitor them. Set up a station.”

Henriksen raises a sceptical eyebrow. “And who’s gonna take care of that?” he says. “We don’t have that kind of expertise.” And then realisation dawns and he inclines his head and says, “Or, we _didn’t_.”

Dean catches Jody’s encouraging look out the corner of his eye, and Henriksen goes on: “You think you could get something like that set up?”

“Damn well hope so,” Dean says. “Don’t think I’ve burned all my bridges in Mechanical just yet. Show me what you got up top, I’m sure Bobby’ll help out with the rest.”

Henriksen doesn’t exactly smile—honestly, Dean hasn’t seen him do that once; maybe it’s just the situation, or maybe his smiling muscles have atrophied—but he does look at Dean with something that might be respect. “Huh,” he says. “Maybe I can find a use for you.”

“Wow, thanks for the vote of confidence,” Dean grumbles. But he sits back in his chair feeling like maybe—just maybe—he’s a little less ill-equipped to deal with this than he thought.

And if his own suggestion makes him a little uncomfortable when he thinks about it too hard—the idea of listening to the private voices of the silo, to lay to rest his fears of being listened to himself—then he turns his thoughts firmly in the other direction.

 

 

 

 

 

The meeting’s done by lunchtime, and after they’ve grabbed some food, Dean and Henriksen wave goodbye to Jody and start their climb for the up tops. They make good time, and soon enough they hit the seventies, the coveralls of the men and women around them giving way from the grubby greens of the mids to Supply yellow and IT white.

This time around, not buried quite so deep in his own head, Dean actually notices things. The way the feel of the silo changes as they near the IT levels, the way it gets cleaner and more orderly. There’s less graffiti on the staircase, less good-natured ruckus in the corridors. Fewer impromptu markets springing up on the landings, fewer kids and dogs and cats running around. Plenty of people still acknowledge them—or acknowledge Henriksen, at least, because their eyes seem to slide away from Dean like he’s a goddamn grease-stain—but it’s all respectful nods and curt _Afternoon, Sheriff_ s. Nobody makes a joke or drags them into conversation, and hardly anybody smiles.

Dean wants to put the fact he’s noticing this stuff down to having emerged from the first fog of grief. Or even simple pragmatism, because he’s gonna have to live with it now, where before he was just passing through.

It ain’t that simple. Before, his worries were a tunnel-vision kind of thing. Now, they’ve kaleidoscoped.

Every unfamiliar face might be hiding something. There’s something new to worry about everywhere he looks. With each flight up, it gets clearer that Dean’s not gonna fit in up here, even if he does have Ellen vouching for him. That he’s gonna have eyes on him the whole damn time. The higher they climb, the harder he has to fight the instinct to turn tail and flee for the down deeps. If it weren’t for the fact that he sees Dad stumble and fall down that bank again every time he thinks about quitting, maybe he would.

He still isn’t in the mood to make idle conversation. But he can’t afford to look worried, to have Henriksen start suspecting he has more than the expected on his mind. If he starts wondering about that voice-that-wasn’t-Cas on the radio, about who they might’ve been and what that might mean—then there’s no way he’s gonna hide the tells. His poker face is good, but it ain’t that good.

So in the end, he asks the only thing he can think of. The expected one, but maybe the only thing he wants to know from Henriksen, anyway. “How was he? Dad? At the end, I mean.”

Henriksen doesn’t say anything for a moment. Dean starts to figure he’s not getting an answer, gets ready to tell himself that at least the awkward silence will keep the focus off of his absent-mindedness for the rest of the trip.

But then, Henriksen lets out a sigh and says, “Hell if I know.”

Dean looks at Henriksen sideways, and he makes a face. Reaches over to grab the water canteen off the side of Dean’s pack, swigs from it, and replaces it before going on.

It’s standard practice, sharing water as you climb—saves having to shrug an unwieldy pack off your back every time you need a drink—but the easy gesture’s a surprise, the good kind. It’s teamwork; it feels a little like acceptance.

“Ain’t like your old man was ever the caring and sharing type,” Henriksen says.

At that, Dean manages a small, pained smile. “Don’t I know it.”

“Hey, everybody up top wishes he’d said _something_.” Henriksen says. “He was popular. We woulda helped him. But he didn’t ask. Just—turned in on himself. He was at the station late a lot. Got no idea what he was looking at. IT took it all soon as he asked to go outside.”

IT again. “Ellen said that,” Dean says, frowning. “What’d they want with it?”

Henriksen doesn’t seem to hear him. “Don’t beat yourself up because he didn’t talk to you,” he says. “He didn’t talk to any of us.”

 _He talked to Sam_ , Dean thinks, but what he says out loud is, “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

Henriksen gives him a _yeah, right_ look, but just adjusts his pack, jerks his head to indicate the next flight of stairs. “C’mon,” he says. “We move our asses, we can crash up on twenty tonight. Easy haul to the up tops in the morning.”

Twenty. IT.

Sam.

Dean looks up, then forces a grin and picks up his pace, overtaking Henriksen. “Who you telling to move his ass?”

Henriksen rolls his eyes, but speeds up obligingly. They climb.

 

 

 

 

Dean doesn’t recognise the woman sitting at the front desk when they make it up to Twenty. Not that there’s any reason he should—he hardly knows anybody around here save Sam and, now, Jess—but he feels a twinge of disappointment anyway, finds himself scouring what he can see of the corridor for mop-headed giants. He could use a familiar face about now.

Unlike most of the other sections, IT separates itself from the staircase with a manned barrier. Nobody gets in or out without permission. Which seems kind of unnecessary. It’s just a bunch of eggheads sitting around fixing computers, right? Nobody else in the silo even understands how the damn things work. It’s not like they’re gonna get robbed if things turn nasty, the way Supply or even Mechanical might.

Still, he and Henriksen have to wait until their IDs have been scanned (Dean’s still reads _Mechanical_ , which earns him a frown from the chick on the desk, but she buzzes him through) before they’re shown where they’ll be sleeping tonight and allowed to ditch their packs and eat.

Dean can hear the sounds of a cafeteria somewhere on the level. Probably one of the smaller ones, like you find every few levels, where people grab quick lunches mid-shift. They’re not invited to go eat with the IT workers, though. Instead, they get food brought to them by a sulky shadow in some kind of transparent-walled meeting room, which makes Dean feel like a chicken for sale at a landing market.

A couple times, he catches sight of the woman at the desk looking over at them and talking into her radio. The guy who takes over when she clocks out from her shift does the same thing.

It could be nothing. If Dean’s job was that boring, he’d probably sit there gawking at whatever strangers happened to pass through, too. The scrutiny gets to him, though, and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat. He catches the guy’s eye, at one point, and he glares back until the guy looks away.

Still no sign of Sammy. Dean catches sight of a blonde head which he thinks might be Jess bustling between offices, but she’s gone before he can decide whether or not it’s actually her. He strains his neck peering over at the door she vanished through, but he can’t get a good look. All he can make out is that all the other offices on the other side of the door—in the section proper—have clear walls, too.

Working in here must feel like being under the microscope the whole time. He wonders how Sam deals with it.

Dean is still frowning about his absence when the door opens and a tiny brunette woman in a white coverall walks in, proffering her hand to Henriksen. She’s Dean’s age, if that, so when Henriksen nods and addresses her as, “Section Head,” Dean blinks at her in surprise.

She turns an unfriendly smile on him. “Problem?”

He blinks. “Uh, no. Just… was expecting someone older, I guess.”

“Youngest ever head of IT. I’m awesome.” There’s nothing friendly in her smirk, though. Dean guesses this must be Ruby. From Jess’s expression the other night, she isn’t popular. “You can stay here tonight,” she goes on. “I’ll have someone show you to the bunkroom.”

Henriksen thanks her, and she’s on her way out the door when Dean asks, “Just wondering—do you know if my brother’s around? He’s a shadow up here. Nearly done with his training. Sam. Sam Winchester.”

Ruby raises an eyebrow. “Sure,” she says. “I know him. He’s busy.”

And that’s it. She turns on her heel and walks out the door.

 

 

 

 

They spend the night on a couple of bunks which were definitely designed by somebody who thought backache and insomnia built character, and at five in the AM, an inhumanly-cheery redhead wakes them with a knock at the door.

“You guys wanna eat before you go?” she asks, as they head for the corridor.

Dean opens his mouth to say _hell yes_ , but Henriksen interrupts him. “We’re gonna make a start. Thanks.”

The redhead shrugs. “Have it your way.”

She comes off as a little more approachable than Ruby—not that that’s difficult—so Dean risks asking her, “You know my brother? Sam?”

“Sure.” She stops in front of the door to another meeting room, just before the exit barrier. It’s one of the few rooms on the level without glass walls. “You’re Dean, right?”

He looks at her in surprise. “He told you about me?”

“Of course!” she says, like it’s obvious, and inclines her head towards the door. “He’s in there, with the section head.” She grimaces a little over the last couple words, and Dean feels a twinge of apprehension. Sounds like being stuck with Ruby is a fate to avoid. He hopes Sam isn’t in any shit on his account.

But he opens the door, and there’s Sammy. He looks tired, shadows under his eyes, but the smile he cracks when he turns around and sees Dean is a real one.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he says.

“Coulda fooled me,” Dean can’t stop himself from saying. “Where were you last night?”

“I didn’t know you were here,” Sam tells him, with that look somewhere between exasperation and puppy-eyes that means he’s willing to reassure Dean right now, but probably not for long. He lowers his voice, eyeing Ruby. “I was working and nobody told me. Sorry.”

He sounds genuine, and Dean feels like an asshole. He stamps down on the thought, though, changes the subject. “You get my—”

Sam cuts him off with a cautioning look. Dean knows it well. When they were kids, it meant, _shh, grown-up alert_ , and even now he falls silent automatically. He conveys the rest of his question with a look, and Sam nods.

“Sam?” It’s Ruby’s voice, and Sam turns towards it like _he’s_ on automatic. Goes right over, with an apologetic look back at Dean, when she beckons. She doesn’t bother greeting Dean, or even Henriksen, just goes back to what she’s doing.

When Sam comes back over, he’s clutching a full water canteen. He holds it out to Dean. “I’ll be in touch,” he says, quietly, a quick flicker of his eyes in Ruby’s direction. “I think maybe I’m onto something. And Dean.” He hesitates, then. “Be careful.”

 

 

 

 

 

They’re on Sixteen when Dean notices Henriksen is lagging behind him.

He’s surprised. The guy set a hell of a pace yesterday, after all. Maybe that was some kind of a macho thing, showing how tough he is—but Dean doesn’t think so. Yeah, Henriksen comes off as kind of a hardass, but Dean doesn’t think it stems from posturing. It’s just an absence of bullshit.

Doesn’t mean Dean’s gonna go easy on him. He turns around, plastering on a grin. “Dude, keep up,” he says. “I knew life in the up tops was a cushy gig, but man, this is embarrassing.”

“Shut your mouth, Winchester,” comes back at him.

Henriksen looks a little surprised at himself, after he says it, and it takes Dean a second to figure out that it was a reflex. Henriksen’s probably said it a hundred times before—just not to Dean.

Henriksen doesn’t apologise, but his expression stiffens and he changes the subject gruffly. “Hang on a second. Gimme some more of that water.”

Dean frowns. The canteen on his pack—the one Henriksen’s been drinking from—is already half-empty. It’s not like they’re even climbing that fast. This morning was supposed to be an easy one; they should be in the up tops within the hour.

“You wanna go easy on that?” he says, frowning. “You’re gonna have to fill up again by Ten, you keep this up.”

Henriksen flips him the bird, and starts climbing again.

But by Fourteen, he’s slowed down, breathing heavily. He waves a hand, gesturing for Dean to wait while he catches his breath, and grimaces.

“Must be coming down with something,” he wheezes. “Just what I need with a shitstorm coming and a green kid for a second-in-command.”

Dean rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t feel any real offense. He takes it for what it is. He knows talking shit because you don’t want to admit you feel like shit—knows it from all the times he got sick as a kid and Dad was too busy working to notice, and so he gave Sammy extra crap to keep him from noticing Dean wasn’t okay. It’s a reflex. He can cut the guy some slack.

They break for a while on Eleven, way behind schedule. Henriksen chugs water and grumbles about the crap that’s gonna be waiting for him when they get up top. Dean doesn’t ask him if he needs help; he knows the answer he’d give if he was the one getting sick, and he figures it’s the same one he’s gonna get. But Henriksen still isn’t looking so hot when they pick up their climb.

They’re not even on Ten when Dean hears his name, spoken in a croak that’s barely recognisable as Henriksen’s voice.

Henriksen’s hanging onto the stair rail, looking a little unsteady on his feet, grey in the face and covered in a film of sweat. He beckons Dean over.

“Hand me the water,” he gets out, ground-glass rough, and Dean passes it over without a word. Watches him swallow what’s left in the canteen—and then cough and double over and cough again, and _shit_ , that’s blood on the staircase, slick and startlingly red, dripping out between Henriksen’s fingers and smearing his chin. The canteen slips from his trembling fingers and clatters down the stairs.

For a moment, there’s a look of sheer panic on his face.

Then it breaks and he turns to Dean, snapping, “The fuck are you doing just standing there?” at the same moment Dean says, “Gimme your pack.”

He drops his own, manoeuvres Henriksen’s off of him and shoves them both to the side of the staircase, out the way. He gets Henriksen’s good arm around his shoulders, and then half-carries, half-drags him up to the next sub-landing, searching up and down the whole time for somebody else on this godforsaken stretch of staircase—somebody who can help them.

It shouldn’t be this empty. It isn’t asshole o’clock in the morning anymore. _Somebody_ ought to be passing by, on their way to work or breakfast or something. Fuck.

Nobody shows. Dean runs back down a couple stairs, grabs his own water canteen off of Henriksen’s pack and hands it to him. Henriksen’s fingers shake. He almost drops the canteen, and Dean sets it upright on the landing beside him, in easy reach.

“I’m gonna get a medic,” he says. “Don’t go anywhere.”

Henriksen grimaces. “No promises.”

“Wiseass,” Dean says, hoping that he doesn’t sound as shit-scared as he feels, and turns and runs.

He reaches Ten gasping for air, doubles over, hands on his knees, unable to speak for a second. The nearest person to the staircase is a kid in porter navy filling a water canteen, and Dean waves an arm at him to beckon him over. Porters spend their lives trotting up and down the stairs, getting to know the different floors. They practically carry schematics of the silo around in their heads.

“Doctor,” Dean manages to get out, as the kid approaches. “Where’s the nearest doctor?”

The kid frowns. “Doctor Tran’s based on this floor,” he says. “I dunno if she’s around, though.” He shrugs.

Dean shoots him a glare that could melt steel. “So why are you just standing there?” he demands.

The kid hovers, uncertain, until Dean gives him a shove. “It’s the goddamn Sheriff,” he says. “It’s bad. Couple flights down, before Eleven. _Go_.” Then he grabs the kid’s shoulder. “Gimme that,” he says and snatches the water canteen out of his hand.

The kid looks none-too-pleased, but he goes, heading down the corridor at a jog. Dean starts back down the stairs.

They’re not deserted anymore. In the fifteen minutes or so Dean’s been away, a small knot of people has gathered around Henriksen where he lies on the landing. Dean barges his way through, holding the full canteen out before him like an offering. But as he gets in close, the guy who’s crouched over Henriksen’s face unfolds into a standing position, catches Dean’s eye and shakes his head sadly.

Dean’s stomach drops. He drops the canteen and sinks to his knees, his breath catching in a way that has nothing to do with sprinting ten flights as fast as his legs could go. His hands shake as he fumbles for a pulse.

He can’t find it.

“Hey,” Dean says. “Hey.” His voice cracks. He doesn’t know if it’s a protest or a plea. “Man, you gotta wake up. You got a rookie to train up, remember? Henriksen, man, c’mon.”

But Henriksen stubbornly stays dead, blood staining the front of his coverall, dripping darkly onto the landing.

 

 

 

 

 

Doctor Tran is a small, sharp-eyed woman in her forties, with an intent, serious face. She doesn’t waste words, and Dean couldn’t be more grateful for that.

He paces back and forth on the other side of the room while she carries out the autopsy, the silence punctuated only by Dean’s footsteps and the occasional quiet request for her shadow to pass her something. Ellen’s here, too, sitting very still in the corner of the room, new lines of sorrow visibly worn into her face since Dean last saw her, a couple weeks ago.

For all that the quiet in the room is a tangible thing, Dean can’t shut his brain up. It’s a constant replay—the blood on the stairs, the guy shaking his head, Henriksen’s lifeless body—and he can’t help but keep on scanning his memory for things he could’ve done differently, noticed earlier.

And, selfishly, he’s shit-scared of what’s gonna happen next. He didn’t know Henriksen well enough to call him an ally, but the guy isn’t—wasn’t—a complete asshole. He didn’t have it out for Dean the way some people might’ve done, didn’t try to distance himself from having been Dad’s closest colleague like Dean was kind of expecting.

Between Henriksen and Cas, Dean’s starting to feel like he’s lost two—well, maybe not friends, but two people he could’ve trusted—in the last twenty-four hours.

There’s something else, too. A suspicion in there that he wants to shy away from, that has him half-dreading the moment Doctor Tran turns around with her verdict.

Because Henriksen was fine last night. Before they stayed in IT. Dean’s never seen anybody get sick that bad, that quick.

Of course, Doctor Tran chooses that moment to say, “We’re done here.”

Ellen gets up from her seat, regards the doctor steadily out of the hollows of her eyes. “Cause of death?”

“It’s hard to prove definitively,” Doctor Tran says. “There are some tests I’ll have to run, and even they may not give us definitive answers. But with no other cases and no prior history of ill-health—” She breaks off. Her expression is very serious. “I don’t think he was sick, Mayor. It’s my opinion that Sheriff Henriksen was poisoned.”

Ellen closes her eyes. “I don’t want to believe it,” she says. “ _I’m_ hardly popular right now, but why anybody would want to kill Victor—”

Dean doesn’t want to interrupt her. Fuck, _fuck_ no, he doesn’t want to tell her what he’s thinking.

But if it’s true—then this is on him. This is because of him. He can’t say nothing.

“I don’t think they did,” he cuts in. “I don’t think this was about the Sheriff at all.” Ellen opens her eyes, and both she and Doctor Tran turn to look at him. He ploughs on. “We climbed together all of yesterday, and this morning. You know how it’s easier to take water from the other person’s pack, when you’re climbing in a pair? You don’t have to reach behind you or stop to take your pack off?”

“Yeah,” Ellen says, slowly, and then understanding dawns on her face. Understanding—followed by horror. “You think—?”

“I think,” Dean says, “It was IT. Henriksen was fine yesterday. They gave us fresh water canteens this morning. And I think it was meant for me.”

“Can you remember who gave you the water?” asks Ellen, her expression darkening.

Dean knows there has to be an explanation for this, he knows he’ll find it just as soon as he can think straight, but his head and his heart and his gut are all caught up in the clutch of _no no no this can’t be happening_ , and he has to force the words out past the tremor in his voice.

“Yeah,” he says, guilt clutching at his throat. “Yeah, I remember. It was Sam.”


	4. Chapter 4

 

There’s no way this is what it looks like. No way in hell.

Sure, Dean and Sam have had their differences—okay, two years of differences—but Sam couldn’t do something like this. He’s a bleeding heart, the whole kitten-rescuing, helping-old-ladies-up-the-stairs deal. Dean won’t believe it of him. He can’t.

From the look on Ellen’s face, neither can she.

Dean re-runs the morning’s events in his head. Sam greeting him, tousle-haired and tired-eyed in the morning, looking genuinely apologetic at not having seen him the previous night. Sam, casting him a cautioning look before answering his question about the heat tape.

No, he didn’t exactly give a straight answer about what he was looking for, but Dean doesn’t think that means Sam was intentionally keeping something from him. He knows his brother’s tells. If he had to guess, he’d say Sam was trying to protect him from something. Protect them both, maybe.

Ruby and Henriksen were the only other people in the room. Ruby called Sam over right before he gave Dean the poisoned canteen.

He clutches at the thought like he’s falling fifty levels and somebody’s just tossed him a lifeline. It isn’t exactly a comforting idea. IT took Dad’s files, and the moment Dean sets foot in the up tops, they have it in for him too—and they were gonna use his own brother to do it. Even so, it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

He lets out a breath, and looks Ellen in the eyes.

“Sam ain’t behind this,” he tells her. “No way he knew about it. But I got an idea who did.”

 

 

 

 

Dean knows, the way everyone in the silo knows, that IT is way more powerful than a section whose job mostly consists of keeping records and fixing computers has any right to be. Not the same way the Mayor is—though they do their damn best to influence who gets the top job. More than once, Ellen’s suggested that she was only allowed to stand because they thought she was some farmgirl from the mids who’d lay back and let herself be walked over, and that they’re gonna do whatever they can to make sure she gets screwed in the next election.

But they act like they don’t have to answer to the Mayor, or the Sheriff, or anybody else in the silo, for that matter. Dean remembers Bobby grumbling about it, back in the days when civil unrest and inter-section violence were more than a distant memory or a hovering possibility—when people still lived with the echoes of old fears about armed mobs from other levels and middle-of-the-night arrests. Two centers of power up top, spreading rumors and misinformation, pulling the silo apart—and dragging everybody else to hell along with them.

Dean’s always known that, just one of those facts of life you don’t need evidence to be aware of, like knowing that up is the surface and down is the center of the earth, or that you can’t breathe outside. Today is the first time he’s really seen it, though. That power’s present, suddenly, breathing and malevolent. It’s like discovering there really are monsters hiding in the shadows, and they’ve been there his whole life and he just hasn’t noticed.

IT just killed an innocent man. They meant to kill _him_. They implicated Sam in it. And if Doctor Tran’s right, there may not even be a way to prove it. There isn’t a damn thing Dean can do.

There’s plenty he _wants_ to do. Hell, given his way, he’d call in everybody in Security, put in a message to Jody for backup, storm in there and arrest Ruby and anybody else who isn’t Sam, screw proof. But they’re gonna have to approach this carefully. He gets that. Yeah, it’d be satisfying to kick Ruby’s office door down and haul her up to the Sheriff’s office—but without proof, they’d have to let her go. And where would that leave Sam?

He takes a deep breath, willing himself to relax, the rage that’s threatening to shake him apart to let up. When he feels like he can speak again, he relays what he knows.

Ellen listens to Dean’s version of events, tight-lipped, rigid with the kind of stillness that’s all incipient movement, though whether she’s poised to strike or break down, he can’t tell.

When he’s done, though, she fixes him with a look and tells him, “We can’t let them know we know.”

Dean stares at her.

“We have no concrete proof,” she reminds him. “No proof of illness doesn’t equal proof of poison. We don’t know what their gameplan is. They were going to _kill_ you, Dean, and they didn’t care who else got hurt in the process. We don’t know what else they might be willing to do. How many more people might be harmed.”

No; Ellen’s not about to break down, but she isn’t about to lash out, either. Her job’s protecting her people, and that’s what she’s gonna do. That’s what Dean should be thinking about, too. There’s no room for his own damn _feelings_ in this.

He can’t switch them off, though. It makes him feel like a dumb kid, and it hits him that Henriksen’s gone same as Dad, and there’s nobody else up here to tell him what to do. He’s never felt more ill-equipped to deal with a situation in his life.

Ellen is still looking at him, holding him pinned there with her eyes. “Understood?” she says.

“Yeah.” Dean rubs tiredly at the back of his neck, wishing he was anywhere but here.

He wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of moving to the up tops in the first place, but he’s feeling it now, wishing the silo would swallow him up, digest him in its steel-and-concrete guts and deposit him gently back in the belly of Mechanical.

Maybe back in the middle of last week, too.

But he’s here, and he has to deal with this shit.

He doesn’t _want_ to drag anybody else into it. One good man dead on his account is too many. But he’s near-enough alone in the up tops. It isn’t like Ellen and Jo are gonna have time to babysit him. He hasn’t even started learning the job; even without IT gunning for his ass, he wouldn’t know where to start.

Dean takes a breath, tries not to imagine Dad looking at him the way he used to when Dean screwed up a simple repair, or that time he was fourteen and he’d gotten distracted flirting with Cassie Robinson and Sam fell on the stairs and sprained his ankle.

“Okay,” he says. “We keep it quiet. But if we’re gonna work this angle, I’m gonna need some help.”

 

 

 

 

It’s late. The radio hisses softly in the silence of the room. Dean’s room, though he feels weird thinking of it like that. It’s blank, without any of the personal touches that made his crashspace in the down deeps feel like home.

He used to draw on scraps of paper torn off of the margins of mechanical drawings and messages and carefully hoarded away, his pictures overlapping the writing from previous uses. Sam and Dad, and Mom—at least, Mom how she looks in Dean’s dreams. He kept all of the pictures, no matter how crappy. Other stuff, too. Little figurines welded out of scrap metal: stick figures; a dog with floppy ears, made for Sam when Dean first learned to do stuff like that, and found discarded in a drawer when Sammy left for the up tops. His own mug, vat-sized for early-shift caffeine requirements. The cushions Mom sewed when he was small, stuffed with the rags of Dad’s worn-out coveralls and Dean’s torn toddler clothes.

He didn’t have room for crap like that when he packed up, so he left it all in his quarters, with a scribbled injunction for the next occupant to bundle it up and pass it on to Bobby or Lisa. Which they might do, if they have the time. Or they might just toss it in the garbage. All the life Dean has right now is a pack of rumpled clothes and a room with bare walls, the white noise of the radio and his own sleeplessness. He’s exhausted with the effort of holding down his anger and his fear, but they won’t let him relax, either. His mind runs in circles.

He tries to occupy it. Grabs a crumpled scrap of paper he stuffed into his pack with the intention of sending a note to Lisa when he got up top, but the effort of relating what happened _and_ trying to make it sound like something in any way okay is exhausting when he even thinks about it. In the end, he just scribbles, _You probably heard about Henriksen by now. I’m fine, don’t worry_ , folds it in half to hand on to a porter in the morning, and flops back onto the narrow bed.

In the aftermath of Henriksen’s death—no, call it what it was: Henriksen’s _murder_ —the shock of hearing that not-Cas voice on the radio last night has gotten away from him. It comes back, now, in the quiet. He can’t help wondering.

He was so sure Cas wasn’t fucking with him. But he doesn’t know that for sure. He doesn’t know anything much about Cas—and if there really is another silo, he doesn’t know anything about that, either.

Dean doesn’t speak into the radio, just listens.

Any other time, he’d tell himself that he’s just being sensible. Having his suspicions—that’s just the sane response. His world is falling down around him and he needs to know as much as he can about whatever’s going on out there. He could even believe that it’s just background noise, blotting out the uneasy quiet of the up tops, the absence of Mechanical’s living noise.

He’s too tired to pretend right now.

Yeah, he wants to know what’s going on. Whether there really is another silo out there, and what Cas meant by telling him if it’s true. Who that other voice belonged to. What they know about him, about all of this. He has a lot of questions.

And yeah, he’d feel easier in the down deeps, with his friends a couple corridors away and the noise of home, the noise the rhythms of his sleep are attuned to, rising and falling in the background.

But mostly, he’s listening because he has nobody else to talk to. He can’t shove his way into IT and demand to speak to Sam without endangering him, Ellen’s as on edge with the whole thing as he is, and Bobby and Lisa and Benny are miles below him. He’s tried finding the channels Mechanical use on the radio, and it doesn’t work. He can’t seem to get hold of anybody else in the silo on it, as a matter of fact. It isn’t even that he wants to spill his guts. Suspicions or none, that isn’t his thing; he sucks at serious conversations. It’s just that he sucks at solitude even worse, and he has way too much of it right now.

A mysterious voice on the radio is the closest thing to a friend Dean has right now. A mysterious voice who might not be on his side. Who might not even be there anymore.

Man, his life just keeps on getting shittier.

He’s jolted out of his slump by an interruption in the hiss of background noise. The sound is indistinct, but Dean jerks upright where he sits on the bed.

He keeps quiet. Listens.

Another muddy suggestion of sound. Then Cas’s voice says, _Dean? Are you there?_

It’s unreasonable, the way relief floods through his system at the sound of it, at just one thing in this shitty day going right.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’m here.”

A sigh on the other end, and maybe it’s his imagination, but he thinks Cas might actually be relieved. _I tried to get through to you yesterday_ , Cas says, then. _You didn’t answer._

Hell if there isn’t a note of accusation in there, the way Sam used to get when they shared a room and Dean came in drunk in the early hours, or found somebody to go home with and didn’t show up until the next morning. Was Cas… worried about him?

Still. “So,” he goes on. “You alone?”

 _Yes?_ The relief is gone, now; there’s a definite edge in Cas’s voice. An edge of what, Dean couldn’t say. _Why do you ask?_

“I dunno if you noticed, but you ain’t the only person picking up on your end.”

A couple seconds’ silence.

“Cas?” Dean prods.

When Cas finally answers him, it’s low and urgent. _Who spoke to you, Dean?_ he asks. _What did they say? It’s important._

So that other voice—it definitely meant something bad. Dean’s stomach contracts. Hasn’t he dealt with his quota of awful shit for one day?

But Cas sounds—well, like he’s freaking out. So Dean pushes down his selfish resentment, and says, “I dunno, man. The guy didn’t exactly give me his name, rank and number, you know? I cut the connection soon as I realised it wasn’t you.”

_Dean. Please. What did he say?_

He shrugs. “I said _Cas?_ and he said— _ooh, who’s here?_ Something like that. Sounded like kind of a smug douche, gotta be honest.”

_What time was this?_

“Yesterday. Early. Around five, I guess.”

There’s another pause, then Cas lets out a breath. Dean hears the hiss of it on the radio. _Gabriel_ , he says. _The situation may be salveageable._

“Who?” Dean frowns. “Cas, are you in some kind of trouble? I guess this guy knows I was talking to you.” One more person’s life down the crapper because of Dean. That’s all he needs.

 _I hope not_ , Cas says. Then, slowly, _Are you?_

Dean slumps forward a little, lets out a defeated laugh. “You could say that.”

_What happened?_

This could still be some kind of trick. Dean knows that. He doesn’t think so, though. It doesn’t seem to fit—Cas’s genuine panic, his relief at figuring out who the other guy was. If this was IT keeping tabs on him, wouldn’t they be a little better at covering their tracks?

“I saw a guy die today,” he says, after a moment. And then, because sparing himself feels like cheating, “Because of me.”

You _hurt someone?_ Cas says. Like he knows Dean, knows he wouldn’t do that.

But he doesn’t. Not really. And Dean doesn’t know Cas, either. The reminder feels heavy in his chest. It’s dumb, letting himself believe he has a friend out there just because he wants one.

He gathers himself up, ignores Cas’s question. “So,” he says. “What’s the setup over there, in _Silo Twenty-One_? Who’s this Gabriel dude?”

If Cas is surprised by Dean’s sudden change of tack, he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t take offence at not being trusted, just says, _Gabriel is my brother._

“Huh,” Dean says, momentarily wrong-footed by the idea of a disembodied voice from the ether having a family. He’d figured the other voice must have belonged to a co-worker. Then, because it seems like the thing to say, “Uh, sorry I called your brother a douche?”

 _Sorry?_ The puzzlement in Cas’s voice sounds genuine, leaves Dean blinking at the radio.

“Well,” he says, “I know brothers can be a pain in the ass—believe me, I know. You still gotta stand up for them, though, right?”

 _We are all brothers and sisters here_ , Cas tells him. _Our loyalty is to the silo._

Dean tries to remember where he’s heard something like that before. It’s a moment before it comes to him.

Years ago, after the unrest Dean and Sam were born into had died down, a lot of people got religion. Not just the mainstream kind, though Pastor Jim’s church up on One-Ninety was standing room only for a while. There were other groups, too. Men and women with long untended hair and sack-like robes stitched together out of torn-up coveralls who went around knocking on doors with earnest spiels about peace and brotherhood and how the silo needed to pray for forgiveness. They’d talked like that, the one time Dean made the mistake of answering the door to them when Dad was out, called each other ‘Brother’ and ‘Sister’.

After that, he started telling Sam to stay real quiet and pretending there was nobody home when they knocked.

The whole thing tapered off after a while, though Dean occasionally sees people in those same weird non-regulation robes hanging around the mids. There must still be a hardcore pocket of them somewhere around there, praying for everybody’s souls, he guesses.

Well, the way things are going right now, they better start praying overtime.

If Cas really is in another silo—well, maybe that’s what it’s like. A whole world full of crazies? No wonder the guy seems a little odd.

“That some kinda religious thing?” Dean asks him.

There’s a huff on the other end of the line, but when Cas answers, _Not exactly_ , he doesn’t sound exasperated.

It’s more like he’s being careful with his words, like he actually wants Dean to understand what he’s saying.

 _Our silo went dark a long time ago_ , he goes on. _Many years before I was born._

“Okay, hold up.” Dean frowns. “ _Went dark_? I’m guessing you don’t mean the generator went on the fritz and nobody’s ever fixed it, so you’re gonna have to explain that one for me.”

 _I’m sorry_. Cas pauses. _When a silo goes dark, it loses contact with Silo One._

“Silo One—okay. Okay.”

Dean sits back against the wall, head spinning. Contact? Silo One? And Cas said he was in Silo Twenty-One.

This is nuts. Nuts enough that Dean’s first instinct is to believe it’s a ruse, that it’s IT fucking with him, trying to drive him crazy or get him to spill the beans about what Dad found out. Because that would be shitty, but this—this is huge. If this is true, it’s the world turned on its head, and Dean doesn’t know how he’s supposed to make room for it in his brain.

He swallows. He doesn’t know the right questions to ask.

Dad would know.

Absence hits him like a hammer in the gut, and he breathes out like he’s just gotten punched.

 _Dean?_ says Cas’s cautious voice. _Are you all right?_

“I dunno, man,” he hears himself say, weakly. He shuts his eyes, opens them again. Thinks hard. “Cas,” he says, after a moment. “Silo One. Silo Twenty-One. How many silos are you saying there are?”

_Fifty-two._

“Holy _shit_. And the others—they all know about each other?” He shakes his head. “How come we don’t?”

Was there some kind of an equipment malfunction, back in the distant past? Have they already _gone dark_? Or did the people in charge here screw something up years ago and get cast out of the network, excommunicated from the human race?

Maybe this silo was the one the Ancients dumped all their undesirables in, the criminals and the people they didn’t want to associate with anymore. Maybe there’s just something wrong with them. With how things have been lately, Dean can almost believe it.

But, _No_ , Cas says. _It isn’t like that. Most of the other silos—they don’t know about the others, either. Many have gone dark. There may be nobody left in them at all. The others are like you—only the silo heads have any idea that other people exist. It’s just us. And_ Silo One.

He can hear the emphasis in Cas’s voice as he says it, like Silo One is something mysterious and intimidating.

Kind of the way Dean is beginning to think of IT.

 _We’re not supposed to know_ , Cas says to him, then. _We’re not supposed to let anybody know that we know. Even that we exist._

“So, you really shouldn’t be talking to me, huh?” Dean says—because that’s the smallest, least insane thing he can think of to say right now.

_No. Our job is only to listen._

There are about a million more questions Dean could—should—ask. Who is Cas listening for? Why? Why not tell everybody else out there that there are all these other silos, all these people, somewhere in the world—that they’re not alone?

But the one that comes out is, “So why did you talk to me?”

 _I think I was… curious_. Cas says. Meditative, like being curious is a new idea that’s just occurred to him now.

“And you kept on talking to me.”

 _Yes_.

“Why?” Dean asks, again.

 _I don’t know_ , Cas says. Then, after a moment, _But I would like to continue._

Dean can feel another ‘why?’ coming on, though it’s more like, ‘I already got you in trouble once, why would you want to do that? I ain’t that special.’

There’s a noise in the background before he can get it out.

 _I have to go_ , Cas tells him, and breaks the connection.

 

 

 

 

“I got a message to Jody Mills,” Ellen tells Dean when he shows up in her office the next morning, achy and sore-eyed from sleeplessness, tugging at the sleeves of his new beige coverall.

He doesn’t feel like himself in it. The deputy’s badge that belonged to Henriksen until last week sits wrong on his chest.

He could be wearing Dad’s old badge, he guesses. Should be, if you wanna get technical about it.

He can’t. There’s an impassable barrier around the idea, inside of his head. Sure, there’s no such thing as formal training for Mayor or Sheriff. As long as Dean can remember, Mayors have been elected and Sheriffs appointed because they were trustworthy, dedicated to the silo, willing to put the welfare of the people before personal gain.

None of that means he feels qualified for the job.

Besides which—it’s _Dad’s_. The job, the office, everything. The desk still has a photograph of Mom on it—printed out on precious paper and folded into a silver frame. Must have cost him a week’s worth of chits.

Mom looks happy, in the picture. She’s in a narrow hospital bed in Medical, clutching a white-wrapped bundle in her arms. Sammy’s scrunched-up pink face pokes out the top of it. She looks tired, too—and Dean knows, now, that isn’t just because she’d just given birth. She knew things nobody in the silo was supposed to know. They must’ve weighed heavy on her. But still, the smile on her face lights up the whole photograph.

Dean vaguely remembers going to visit her. Being allowed to sit on the edge of the bed with Sammy balanced in his lap, Dad’s hands holding him in place so he didn’t fall. Trying to get Sam to look at him. Mom gently reminding him, _he’s just a baby_ when he got frustrated. The medical staff talking over his head, a doctor clucking in surprise when Dad and Dean walked in, exclaiming, _Two kids? You two must be the luckiest couple in the silo, having your number come up twice in the lottery!_

The kids in Ms Moseley’s class had told Dean _he_ was lucky, when he found out he was gonna have a kid brother or sister. None of the others did, and Jo had told him he had to share when the baby was born, and he’d poked his tongue out at her and said _no_ and she kicked him in the shin and he pulled her hair and then they both got sent to sit in the corner.

 _Lucky_. People used to say that about his family a lot, once upon a time.

It’s been a while. But Dean heard it again, this morning, whispered on the edge of his hearing as he tramped up the final set of stairs to the office. An edge of sarcasm to it.

He knows he’s gonna have plenty of that kind of crap to deal with. Inevitable, under the circumstances. It made him bristle, though; made him want to turn around tell everybody on the staircase exactly what he thinks of the up tops. It isn't like he wanted to lose Dad, have his world turned on its head, see a good man killed just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A couple days ago, he might not have been able to restrain himself. But after the conversation he had with Cas last night, he has this weird feeling, like he’s floating half-in and half-out of his world. Like the people in it aren’t quite real anymore. Or, not that—like they’re sleepwalkers, moving half-aware around him, and he doesn’t know if it’s safe to wake them up.

Ellen is looking at him, waiting for an answer.

“Huh,” he says. “What’d you tell her?”

“That we could use her help up here. She won’t wanna stay in the up tops long term, I know that, but she can help you settle in. Give you the benefit of her experience.”

“And keep the rest of the guys in line if they won’t listen to me, that it?”

It sounds more bitter than Dean intended, and he finds himself flushing under Ellen’s hard stare. “We ain’t popular right now,” she tells him. “We can’t risk unsettling people, and an undisciplined Security’s a hell of a way to do that. People feel like they ain’t being protected, they start wanting to take the law into their own hands.”

“I get it,” Dean says, dropping his gaze. “Sorry.”

“I know,” Ellen says. Her voice softens, then. “Your dad may have been onto something, Dean. I think we deserve to know what. That doesn’t mean you gotta turn into him. I'm not asking you to do that.”

Dean opens his mouth to ask what she means by that, but the look on her face is _conversation over._

“Now,” she tells him, “I suggest you get on over there and introduce yourself. You have work to do.”

 

 

 

 

It’s still early, but the lights are on in the Sheriff’s office. Dean can’t begin to guess what kind of a reception he’s gonna get from the people who worked with Dad and Henriksen, but if his life at the moment is any kind of benchmark, it’s probably gonna suck.

There’s just one person there when he walks in. A slight young woman with hair piled up on top of her head, her back to the door as she fiddles with the coffee pot. She starts as he opens the door, turns around wiping coffee off on her sleeve. A crucifix on a fine gold chain bounces at her throat. An ancient thing, probably passed down from a grandmother’s grandmother, from before anyone in the silo can remember.

She’s pale, her eyes rimmed with red. She looks like she didn’t get much sleep last night. Least they have something in common.

Dean blinks at her. He opens his mouth intending to introduce himself, but what comes out of it is, “ _You’re_ security?”

The girl gives him a small smile. “Paperwork, mostly.” She nods her head at the only desk in the room with a computer on it. Then she holds out her hand. “I’m Nancy.”

“Dean,” he replies, shaking it. He’s going to ask her where the others are, or how they normally start their shifts around here, or even if he can have a cup of coffee—because this may technically be his office now, but he sure as hell doesn’t feel that way—but her eyes go wide at the sound of his name, lighting on the badge pinned to the front of his coverall.

“Oh,” she says, “oh, of course,” and then, “I’m so sorry.” For a horrific moment, she looks like she’s about to burst into tears.

Thankfully, the door opens again before she can break down.

There are two other guys based up here. Garth—Nancy’s cousin, a scrawny, perma-cheerful guy a couple years younger than Dean, who introduces himself with the bashful enthusiasm of a puppy that wants to be friends but remembers the last time it got overexcited and pissed on the floor. Dean can’t imagine how he and Dad ever got along, but the guy seems pleased to see him, so he counts that as a plus.

Then there’s Rufus. He’s exactly the kind of grizzled old curmudgeon Dean imagined working with Dad, and he doesn’t seem impressed, eyeing Dean balefully and muttering something about Security having turned into a babysitting service before he crosses to a desk in the far corner of the office, retrieves a flask from the top drawer, and takes a long pull at it.

Dean raises an eyebrow at him. Rufus returns his look, hard.

Then he makes a face that might be amusement or dismissal, jerks his head at John’s empty desk, and says, “Ain’t you got settling-in to do, kid?”

Dean ought to tell him exactly where he can shove it. Ask him why he didn’t ask for the job himself, if he’s so damn pissed at having to work with a _kid_. Letting himself be spoken to like this on his first day—it doesn’t exactly look good, and he knows it. But the photograph standing alone on the desk arrests him; the imprints in the dust where the computer’s been taken away.

IT took it. Dean isn’t optimistic enough to think he’ll ever get Dad’s files back, but he’s gonna need a new computer. It’s as good an excuse as he’s likely to get for snooping around on the IT levels.

He touches the edge of the desk, smudging the dust with his fingertips. Opens the drawers. There’s nothing in them, except for the standard copy of the Order in the top. He straightens up.

“I got something I need to do,” he decides. “You guys okay here?”

“You bet!” says Garth, a touch too enthusiastically. Nancy gives him a faint smile that he thinks is supposed to be reassuring, and Rufus just casts him a look so withering Dean thinks he actually feels his insides start to shrivel.

He grabs a master key from the hook by the door and makes a break for it before the old guy can open his mouth. Man, he hopes Jody gets up here soon.

 

 

 

 

The chick on the front desk at IT doesn’t look pleased to see him, but she doesn’t look surprised, either. She maybe doesn’t even know he’s supposed to be dead. Best case scenario: Ruby was behind the attempt on his life, and her underlings don’t even know about it. No way the whole section does, anyhow.

But that doesn’t mean Dean can trust anybody here. News travels fast in the silo; more than once, on the climb down, he’s had a passer-by clock the badge and give him a nod and a, “Sorry to hear about the Sheriff.”

People must be getting used to saying that around here.

Dean keeps it polite, which is fucking heroic, in his opinion. Ellen didn’t tell him this job was gonna be safe, but she never told him was gonna involve making nice with murderers. Front desk chick listens to his request with a bored expression, before motioning him to an uncomfortable seat in the waiting area. Then she disappears.

There’s one other person in the waiting room, a middle-aged woman in Supply yellow. Dean glares at her out the corner of his eye, willing her to get up and move. She doesn’t catch his eye, but after a couple minutes, she heaves a sigh, gets to her feet, and trudges out to the water fountain on the landing.

Dean doesn’t waste time. He casts a quick glance around, and slips past the entrance barrier, heading down the corridor and in the opposite direction to the way the front desk girl went—toward the doors marked ‘private’. Briefly, he considers sneaking into the locker room and switching out his coverall for one in IT white, but decides that whatever extra time that might buy him isn’t worth the suspicion that’ll fall on his head if he’s caught wandering around dressed in another section’s colour.

He starts at the very end of the corridor, and works his way back. The first door he tries is locked shut, and the key from the Sheriff’s office doesn’t work. Which is suspicious enough on its own. The door is unmarked, not even a ‘No Entry’ sign. There’s no sign of life, though, just a faint electronic hum coming from within.

The next one, ditto. But the one after that is wedged open. Score.

Dean eases through the door, glancing back down the corridor to check there’s still nobody around. Once he’s inside, he tucks himself in behind the door, back to the wall, breathing as quietly as he can.

There’s no sound. Doesn’t seem to be anybody around. He’s in another corridor, two rooms branching off it. One of them looks like a standard office—a desk with a computer, a heavy bound copy of the Order, like in the Sheriff’s office upstairs, and beside it, a bigger stack of actual paper than Dean has ever seen all at once.

The door of the other room is closed. Its hinges creak, loud in the silence, when Dean opens it, and his heart races.

Nobody comes. He steps inside.

And blinks in surprise, because whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t this.

It’s a workshop. Like Bobby’s, downstairs, only way cleaner and more organised, and there are a couple things in here that definitely wouldn’t belong in Mechanical. Like—the two benches at the far end with… sewing machines on them?

No sign of whatever it is they actually make in here, though. There are a couple storage crates near the back wall, and Dean grabs a screwdriver, is ready to make a start on prising the lid off of the top one when he hears footsteps.

On instinct, he ducks down behind the crates.

The footsteps approach. Two sets of them. Dean hears the door opening, something heavy being deposited just inside. A muffled voice says, “That’s the last one.”

“About time,” says the other. “Least we can get on with the damn job now. Section head says we’re gonna need a whole bunch.”

The first speaker snorts. “Thank your lucky stars we don’t gotta rely on Supply,” she says. “You want to grab a coffee before we get started here?”

An affirmative grunt, and the footsteps recede back down the corridor. Dean waits until they’re out of hearing range before he ducks out from behind the crates.

 _We don’t gotta rely on Supply_. That was weird. But now that he thinks about it, he notices that the crates he’s been hiding behind don’t have the stencilled lettering that would normally tell a porter to return them to Supply when they were done with. They don’t have any other section’s mark on them, either. The new ones, by the door, are blank, too.

Now, maybe Dean’s just paranoid, but that makes him think somebody’s hiding something.

 _We’re gonna need a whole bunch_. That was unexpected, too. It isn’t like demand for IT’s services fluctuates. The silo is designed to keep up its equilibrium. It’s why they have the lottery, why each section has a designated number of workers and a quota, why supplies are rationed and living quarters allocated by the Mayor’s office.

Is Ruby running some kind of black-market scam?

One that’s worth killing people over?

It doesn’t seem to fit. Humans do some fucked-up shit, Dean knows that, but she already has one of the most powerful jobs in the silo. Youngest section head in living memory. Risking it all for a few hundred extra chits wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

He’s frowning, trying to make the whole thing make sense, when he lets himself out into the main corridor—and walks right into Ruby.

They both start back, blinking. Dean opens his mouth and nothing comes out.

It’s Ruby who recovers her composure first. The smile she turns on him is positively venomous.

“Deputy,” she says. First time anybody’s called Dean that to his face, and Ruby manages to make it sound like it’s the worst insult she knows. She raises an eyebrow. “Lost?”

“Sure.” Dean plasters on a grin. If she thinks he’s gonna slip up because he’s afraid to play dumb, she’s gonna have to think again. “Just looking for the men’s room. Came down here to see if you could fix me up with a new computer.”

Ruby gives him an incredulous look. “You got lost? And they’re letting _you_ run the show upstairs? God help us all.” She turns and makes for the waiting area, and Dean doesn’t have much choice but to follow.

No sign of Sam, again. If Ruby’s his caster, shouldn’t he be following her around the place like, well, a shadow?

“So,” Dean says, looking sideways at her. “Where’s my brother?”

“Busy,” she replies.

“Doing what?” Dean prods.

Ruby turns to stare at him like he’s something nasty on her shoe. “Some things are more important than your little family reunions,” she tells him, any pretence of patience vanishing. “Sam understands that. If you actually care about this silo—” and the look she turns on him suggests she very much doubts it “—then you should start doing the same.”

She turns abruptly, slamming open the door to a room full of people sitting at computers and stalking in. Good thing she does, probably, because Dean finds himself on the verge of snapping right back at her, hands balled into fists at his sides, a flush of rage making its way up the back of his neck.

She’s the one hiding some kind of clandestine shit in the back of her section. She’s the one who had Henriksen killed—who tried to kill _him_. What kind of moral high-horse does she think she’s sitting on, talking about caring for the silo?

Of course, Dean has exactly zero proof of any of that. If he starts throwing accusations around, he’ll just be giving Ruby ammo—a good reason to say he’s crazy like his old man was, to call Ellen’s judgement into question for hiring him.

He keeps his mouth shut, but it makes him want to puke.

Out of the corner of his eye, he catches sight of a head of blonde hair and a kinda-familiar profile at one of the desks. Jess. She turns her head as they walk in, and the brief smile that crosses her face when she spots Dean dies as her gaze lands on Ruby.

“Tammi,” Ruby is saying, to a dark-haired woman near the door. “Why don’t you go help the Deputy find a new computer?”

Before she can reply, Jess stands up, flashing a wide, false smile in Ruby’s direction. “Why don’t I do that?” she suggests. “I’m on a break. That way, Tammi won’t have to interrupt what she’s doing; I’m sure it’s important.”

Ruby glares at her, but she’s already linked her arm through Dean’s and started dragging him out of the room. Finally, Ruby gives a short nod and stalks off down the corridor, back into the recesses of IT.

 

 

 

 

“So, you don’t like her either, huh?” Dean says, once he’s pretty sure she’s out of earshot.

Jess ducks her head a little. “That obvious?”

“Kinda.”

She gives him a tiny, embarrassed smile. Then her expression turns serious and she starts down the corridor, fast, tugging Dean along with her. “Keep walking,” she says, voice low, eyes ahead.

Dean does as he’s told.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Jess tells him, still in an undertone, once they’re safely hidden in a storage room off a side-corridor near the entrance. “It’s not like I can’t stand my boyfriend working for another woman, or anything like that. I’m not _that_ insecure. Pass me that cable.”

He does. “Okay,” he says. “So what is it like?”

“I don’t trust her. In general, not just with Sam. And I don’t know what you’re doing down here, but I think you need to be careful.”

Dean doesn’t know if he wants to sigh with relief or groan with despair.

He and Ellen aren’t the only ones who suspect there’s something screwed-up going on in IT. And if Jess thinks Ruby’s suspicious, that means she isn’t in on whatever Ruby’s planning. Which likely means Sam isn’t, either.

But if Sam and Jess are supposed to be in the dark and they start to suspect—well, they might be in as much danger as he is.

He tries not to give away what he’s thinking, just looks guardedly at Jess—who’s now rummaging through a box of miscellaneous computer parts—and says, “Go on.”

“You won’t remember this,” Jess tells him. “I didn’t—I had to go look it up. But way back when—when we were kids, when—when your mom was killed?” She watches Dean’s face, cautious, like she’s afraid to upset him by broaching the subject. He nods at her to go on, stony-faced. “The head of IT was a guy named Azazel. He left under some kind of a cloud. The records aren’t exactly clear, but reading between the lines—he was gunning for the old Mayor, spreading misinformation to discredit him. He got a bit too creative with his rumours and ended up being exposed. Azazel definitely had an agenda. He died a couple years back, but get this? The guy was Ruby’s uncle.”

“Okay,” Dean says. “So, what, you think he was planning some kind of a coup, and Ruby inherited his plan?”

“I don’t know.” Jess fishes a component out of the box, looks at it, and sighs. “I just think there are things we aren’t being told here. And from some of the things Sam’s told me—she definitely thinks IT should be running the silo, not the Mayor. She doesn’t like you, that’s for sure. Sam thinks she just needs to get to know you, give you a chance—but I don’t know. When Ruby decides she doesn’t like somebody, I don’t think she gives second chances.”

She looks pensive, and Dean feels his insides twist uncomfortably. “Jess,” he hazards, after a second. “Do _you_ feel safe here?”

She hesitates. “Sam wants to think she means well. I know he does. He wants to believe your dad wasn’t crazy, just like you do—but Ruby’s his caster, and he looks up to her, and, much as it pains me to say it, they’re friends. He wants to believe in her, too. Me? I know Ruby’s keeping something from us, but that doesn’t mean she’d harm us. I don’t know how far she’s willing to go.”

“Huh,” Dean says. “Because, I think I do, and I’m thinking maybe you and Sam are the ones who need to be careful.” He pauses. “I think she killed Henriksen. And I think she meant to kill me.”

He spins around as he hears the door shut behind them. He hadn’t even heard it open. Jess starts, looking up a little guiltily.

Sam’s standing in the doorway. He doesn’t look happy.


	5. Chapter 5

 

“That’s a hell of an accusation, Dean,” Sam says. “When were you gonna tell me about it?”

“As soon as your damn caster let me see you, that’s when,” Dean retorts. “You don’t think it’s a little fucked-up she has such a problem with you talking to your own brother?”

“I think _something_ ’s fucked up here, for sure,” Sam says.

In the corner of his field of vision, Dean sees Jess’s troubled look. He narrows his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know.” Sam lets out a sigh, deflating. “Look, I’m not—I don’t know what was going through Dad’s head, those last couple weeks. I just know that you’re starting to sound like him, and it worries me.”

“Yeah, well, forgive me if I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.” It comes out like a snarl, because the alternative is begging. _C’mon, Sam_ , he wants to say. _Don’t make me doubt you, please._

Sam looks back at him. His mouth works, but nothing comes out, and with nothing to kick back against, Dean finds his heart sinking.

“Sammy,” he says. “You _know_ something’s going on here that ain’t on the up-and-up. You gave me the idea in the first place. What was all that shit with the heat tape about otherwise?”

“I don’t know yet.” Sam’s voice is tight.

“What are they making up the corridor there? You got any ideas?”

A muscle in Sam’s jaw twitches. “I don’t know that, either.”

“Yeah? Well, if your damn caster’s so trustworthy, why don’t you ask her? See what she's got to say for herself?”

Sam shakes his head. “Dean,” he says, and his voice is quieter. “I know there’s something going on here. I do. My section’s doing _something_ it shouldn’t, stepping on toes, overstepping its function—and maybe Ruby stands to profit from it, I don’t know. I’m gonna find out. But it’s a big jump from there to—to murder.” He looks at Dean sadly. “Henriksen died of a heart condition. It’s awful, and look, I’m really sorry you had to see it. But throwing around accusations like this? It isn’t gonna help anything.”

“Heart condition. That’s what they’re telling you, huh?”

Sam blinks. “That’s what the official report said.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean scowls, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I was there at the autopsy. Doctor Tran thought the whole thing was shady; she just couldn’t prove it is all. The toxin that could do that to someone—there isn’t a reliable way to find it in the system. Ellen was there too. Ask her if you don’t believe me.”

“Maybe I will,” Sam says. But his certainty is slipping. Dean can see it, and he feels a flicker of hope.

But he isn’t done yet. “You know what else?” he goes on. “I was climbing with Henriksen, when he died. We shared water. You know how you do, when you’re on a long climb with someone?”

Sam nods, dumbly.

“Now Ruby—she’s always lived in the up tops, right? Hasn’t made a whole lot of long climbs?”

“I—guess not?” A shadow crosses Sam’s eyes.

“So she wouldn’t know about that. She was gonna poison somebody, she’d make sure the toxin went direct to them. That canteen you handed me in the morning—she gave it to you, right?”

“I—yeah.” Sam’s expression freezes. Mouth open, horrified. “Dean—”

It’s Jess who interrupts them, casting an anxious look towards the door.

“It isn’t safe to keep talking here,” she says. “Dean, come see us this evening, after your shift. My quarters are on Twelve. We’ll meet there.”

“Yeah,” he says, eyes still on Sam. “I’ll be there. You guys be careful, okay?”

“You too,” Jess tells him. “I’m gonna have your computer equipment sent up later today,” she goes on, then. Her pretty face is grim. “But listen—maybe tomorrow, or maybe the day after, someone from IT is gonna discover a fault with the system and come up to fix it. You can’t argue with them without arousing suspicion, so don’t. But whatever you do, don’t put anything on that computer that you don’t want Ruby to see. You probably don’t even wanna talk about it in your office.”

Dean nods understanding. It doesn’t surprise him, the idea that IT are spying on anyone they think might be suspicious. He already knows they took Dad’s files.

Fuck if it doesn’t make him feel claustrophobic, though. He feels more trapped up here than he ever did in the down deeps.

Sam’s managed to shake himself out of his trance, and he looks at Dean, his brow creased with worry. “Jess is right,” he says. “Anything you need to keep a record of, write it down.”

“Sure.” Dean doesn’t know where he’s supposed to get the paper for that kind of thing, but that seems like the least of his problems right now.

Sam opens the door to the corridor. His gaze darts up and down, like he’s afraid somebody’s gonna leap out at him.

The haunted look in his eyes tempers Dean’s relief at finally having his brother listen to him. He finds himself half-wishing he could take back everything he’s just told Sam, protect him from knowing how much shit they’re actually in.

He can’t. He isn’t even sure he can protect himself.

Front desk girl lets him out past the barrier without so much as a sideways look. Dean puts a pace on as he climbs up the stairs, but however many flights he puts between himself and IT, he feels no sense of relief.

Sam and Jess are still down there, and Ruby still has it in for him. He doesn’t feel like he’s escaped anything at all.

 

 

 

 

Dean reaches the up tops again early in the afternoon. He checks into the office—still no word from Jody—then grabs lunch in the cafeteria, sitting alone with his back to the viewscreen.

He doesn’t think he’s ever gonna be able to look out at that view again. Bad enough just knowing how close it is, up here.

He sits far enough away from the other lunchtime stragglers that their conversations are muffled, but he’s still uncomfortably aware of the occasional wary glance in his direction, a jerk of a head or a brief nudge of elbows. The sensible thing to do would be to keep an ear open, find out what’s being said about him, about Ellen. Jess talked about IT spreading rumours to bring down people they don’t like, and that’s something else he’s gonna have to start worrying about, which is just awesome.

But the reminder that the rest of the silo think he’s either a green kid who’s gotten the job through nepotism or as crazy as his father—and that they might be right, on the former score at least—is just too damn depressing. Dean bolts down his lunch without tasting it and walks back to the office with his head down.

His relief at being back there is short-lived.

There’s a tension in the room that wasn’t there before, and now he’s back, it occurs to Dean how his morning’s excursion might look to an outsider. Either he’s a dumb rookie who isn’t up to the job, and he knows it, and he was running away—or he’s showing signs of paranoia himself, chasing on down to IT after being reminded that they took his old man’s files.

Not his greatest-ever PR move, he has to admit. Nancy's nothing but polite, and Garth’s still giving him the let's-be-friends puppy-eyes, but he can feel Rufus’s unimpressed look boring into the back of his head from the other side of the office.

He needs to show willing; let them know he’s up to learning the ropes of the job. With Henriksen gone, no sign of Jody, and Rufus looking at him like he’s a stain on the floor, he only has one guide for that.

With a sigh, he pulls open the bottom drawer of Dad’s desk, and heaves the black-bound copy of the Order up onto the desktop on front of him. It lands with a thump, and Dean doesn’t need to turn around to know that there are eyes on him.

The print looks strange to him, at first. The Order is _old_ —not just the text of it, but the books themselves. Old, as in, centuries old, from the days before paper was a precious commodity. The binding looks like it’s been torn and taped back together a dozen times, and there’s something unnatural about the wide-spaced print and the white space around it.

Dean blinks at it a couple times, then starts to read.

The first couple paragraphs are as familiar to Dean as the instructions for wiring a plug, or the prayers Mom used to say with him before tucking him into bed when he was tiny. They’re rote learning for every kid in the silo, the basis for their whole way of life.

So it’s weird, how he finds himself seeing all the gaps in them now. The assertions with nothing to back them up; the assumptions that have always seemed so natural, but now he can’t keep from wondering—what if they’re wrong?

There’s nothing but poison in the outside world. Curiosity about it isn’t just pointless; it’s dangerous. It encourages people to waste their time speculating, when they should be working for the good of the silo and the people who live here. It makes them want to risk their lives. And, worse than that, it makes them seek knowledge at the expense of order, of safety, of a secure future for the human race.

The silo is what survives of humanity, and the silo has a duty to keep surviving. A duty to the Ancients who built it, before the world became uninhabitable. A duty to the children yet to be born.

But if what Cas told him is right—if there really are more silos, more _people_ out there—then isn’t that a big, steaming pile of crap?

Shouldn’t they be sending out radio signals all the time, actively looking for those other people? Talking to them? Trying to re-establish contact with Silo One, wherever it is, and find out what happened? Maybe the people there know what happened before, in the time of the Ancients. Maybe they know why people can’t live out on the surface anymore. Who knows—maybe they even have ways of monitoring the atmosphere out there, figuring out whether it’s ever gonna be safe again. There are so many possibilities, and Dean can’t dismiss them anymore. He can’t believe that just thinking them is wrong.

Maybe it’s everything that’s happening, the way his world seems to be falling down around him, making him feel like nothing he knows is real. Or maybe it’s just how sincere Cas sounded on the radio. He doesn’t even know the guy, and trusting anyone is about the craziest thing he could do right now, but Dean can’t convince himself that Cas is working for Ruby. He comes over so open and wondering, so interested in the world. So kind.

Dean’s still staring at the first page when the radio buzzes.

The reminder that he’s in a room with other people startles him, makes him feel a little guilty, like all of his treasonous thoughts are written across his face for the others to see.

None of them look at him. Garth reaches across to pick up the radio.

“Hey,” he says. “What can we do for ya?”

Rufus shakes his head, giving Dean a look that reminds him uncannily of the one Bobby used to turn on him when he fucked something simple up, back when he was still a shadow down in Mechanical. It occurs to him that, oh yeah, answering the radio probably is his job, and he shifts uncomfortably in his chair.

 _On Fourteen_ , says the voice on the other end of the radio. _Caught one of my people thieving. Things have been going missing for months, but he won’t own up to it. Can you send someone down?_

“Sure,” chirps Garth. “Where you at?”

_Porters’ station._

“We’ll be there in a half-hour,” Garth assures the guy, and hangs up.

Then he looks at Dean.

Who swallows. Closes the Order, carefully, and stands up. “Okay,” he says, jerking his head towards the door.

Garth is already out of his chair. Rufus turns back to his desk like he’s washed his hands of the both of them, and Dean finds himself sticking there, frowning. No, he decides. No, this isn’t how it’s gonna be.

“Garth,” he says. “You hold the fort, alright?” Garth gives him a quizzical look, but sits back down. “Rufus?” he says, then. “Why don’t you come with me?”

It comes out sounding more like a question than he’s aiming for. Rufus raises an eyebrow, but joins him at the door.

 

 

 

 

They wind up in a cramped office on Fourteen, an up tops outpost of Supply. The guy who called them stands against the door with his arms crossed, balefully eyeing the skinny kid—not much more than a shadow—who glowers back at him from the chair. The office is a mess, and the guy it belongs to is dishevelled, bags under his eyes, belly sagging against the front of his coverall in a way that suggests he hasn’t been as far the mids in a long time. He shakes his head wearily when Dean and Rufus walk in.

“Had things going missing for months,” he says. “I know this punk’s behind it. Just can’t find where he’s keeping the stuff.”

Dean hears an exasperated noise from behind him. He turns around, and sees Rufus already reaching for his handcuffs. “Alright,” he’s saying, looking at the kid. “Why don’t we take a little trip down to your quarters and have a look around?”

The kid lets slip a little smirk, and Dean frowns.

Hiding things in his quarters? Actually, that seems like a dumb thing to do. There’s a manned gateway at the entrance to the Supply corridor. No way he’d get stuff up and down the stairs on a regular basis without being noticed. It would make more sense to keep the goods here and pay off a porter, send them out to wherever it’s going with the rest of the deliveries.

“Hold on a sec,” Dean tells Rufus, getting a raised eyebrow in return. He ignores it, turns to the guy who called them. “Where’s he work?” he asks, jerking his head in the kid’s direction.

The guy shrugs. “I can show you,” he says. “But like I said, I already searched his locker, workstation, everything. No sign of the stuff.”

“Sure you did. Gonna have to take a look anyway.”

The guy eyes him sceptically, and Dean wonders briefly which camp he falls into. One of the people who think Dean’s a dumb rookie, or the ones who think he’s a dangerous nutjob?

He pushes the thought away. He needs to concentrate, unless he wants to give them all good reason to think he’s incompetent.

“Fine,” the guy says, and opens the door.

“Let’s go,” Dean says, nodding to Rufus to bring the kid with him.

He goes along with it, but as he passes Dean, he shoots him a look that clearly says, _Kid, you better know what you’re doing_. Dean isn’t exactly sure he does—but he has an idea.

 

 

 

 

Looks like the kid was doing pretty menial work, most of the time, packing up supplies for delivery at a corner workstation. Dean takes a look around and, sure enough, finds what he’s expecting: a vent just above floor level, right beside the kid’s workstation. He holds a hand beside the grating. No air movement. Half the vents in the silo don’t seem to do anything, truth be told—the Ancients must’ve really overestimated the temperature down here.

Dean looks up at guy who called them. “Got a screwdriver?” he asks.

The guy frowns at him, shakes his head. So Dean turns to Rufus. “I’ll bet the kid does,” he suggests, and sure enough, the scowl the kid turns on him is definitely one that means, _Shit, busted._

Dean gets the vent open, sticks his hand in and feels around in there. Finds the edge of something wrapped in plastic and pulls it out.

It’s a box of lightbulbs, the name _Talbot_ and the number _56_ scrawled on the wrapping. Dean doesn’t recognise it, doesn’t know anybody of that name in the fifties, but then it isn’t like he knows many people in this half of the silo. He holds it up for Rufus to see.

“Don’t surprise me,” Rufus tells him. “I know her. Crooked as they come.” Maybe it’s Dean’s imagination, but he thinks there’s—okay, not exactly approval, but maybe a little less _dis_ approval in the way Rufus is looking at him.

He finds a couple more packages stuffed in the vent, addressed to different names. The kid gets up a half-assed protest about not knowing where they came from, but once Rufus suggests they start dusting for fingerprints, it doesn’t last.

“Twenty-chit fine for theft,” Rufus tells the kid.

“That’s half a day’s pay!” the kid objects, appalled.

“Well,” Dean puts in. “We _could_ take you upstairs, wait until the interim Sheriff shows up and decides what to do with you. Course, she might be a few days getting here. Wonder how much pay you’ll lose sitting around in the cells?”

“Screw you!”

“Or you could tell us which of the porters you’re paying off to carry this stuff for you, and maybe we’ll find it in our hearts to give you a chance. First offence, and all that.”

The kid sags with defeat. “Okay,” he says. “It’s one of the shadows.” He looks up. “Kid called Krissy Chambers.”

 

 

 

 

Dean’s lost in his thoughts for most of the climb to the porters’ station; lost enough that he doesn’t register Rufus talking to him at first.

“You listening, Rookie?” breaks into his reverie, at last.

“Uh—yeah?” he hazards.

Rufus shakes his head. “I _said_ , maybe you ain’t quite as useless as you look,” he says. “Don’t make me reconsider.”

“Huh,” Dean says. “Thanks.”

It feels pretty hollow. Krissy seems like a good enough kid—smart and enterprising, and okay, with the makings of a hardass businesswoman, but good—and she’s _young_. He hopes she’s not in this thing too deep.

“How’d you figure that out?” Rufus asks him. “With the air vent? Ain’t exactly the obvious place to hide stolen goods.”

Dean looks down, embarrassed. “Everybody did a little petty theft when they were younger, right?” he says. Rufus just raises an eyebrow. “’S what we used to do down in Mechanical, when I was a shadow,” Dean admits.

“Thought as much.”

“What?” Dean demands, but Rufus just shrugs and keeps climbing.

 

 

 

 

Krissy isn’t around when they get to the station. The head porter lets them in, though he doesn’t make much effort to hide his hostility when he looks from Dean’s badge to his face and recognises who he is.

“You can check out the kid’s locker,” he tells them—pointedly addressing Rufus, which Dean should maybe be pissed about, only he can’t find the energy to care. “But you wanna talk to her, you’re gonna have to wait. They’re on a job, ain’t due back until tonight.”

The guy produces a master key and opens the locker. Dean’s heart sinks when he catches sight of three plastic-wrapped packages, same as the one the kid in Supply was hiding.

“We’re gonna have to take these,” Dean tells the guy. “We’ll be back down to talk to Krissy in the morning. Don’t let her take any jobs.”

“Sure thing,” the guy tells Rufus.

Well. At least if people are ignoring Dean, they can’t see how fucking exhausted he is; how he permanently feels about two minutes away from turning tail and crawling back down to Mechanical. As first days on a job go, this has to be one of the most depressing anybody’s ever had.

 

 

 

 

There’s a message from Jody waiting in the office, when they get back upstairs. Nancy slides the folded scrap of paper across her desk to Dean, though from the relief on her face, she’s obviously read it.

 _Be there day after tomorrow, latest_ , it reads. _TAKE CARE._

Dean’s relief is short-lived when he sits down at his desk and starts going through the evidence.  
On impulse, he reaches for one of the packages from Krissy’s locker. The tape holding the plastic wrapping together is hanging off, like maybe it’s gotten caught on something and been pulled off—or like it’s been tampered with.

He tugs at the wrapping, frowns when he sees a corner of paper peeking out from inside. He glances around him before tugging it out, making sure everybody else in the office is absorbed in their work—or their conversation, or their coffee-with-something-stronger-in-it—for reasons he can’t really pinpoint himself. It occurs to Dean that paranoia’s becoming second nature to him—but he’s glad of it, a moment later, when he pulls out the scrap of paper and sees what’s written on it in hand-printed capital letters.

The message reads, _JOHN WINCHESTER WAS RIGHT._

 

 

 

 

Dean stays late in the office, waits until everybody else has gone home. He keeps the note tucked into the chest pocket of his coverall, but he’s hyper-aware of it all afternoon, has to keep finding things to occupy his hands to keep himself from tugging at the zipper just to be sure it won’t fly out and incriminate him in front of everyone else in the office.

Incriminate him in what, he doesn’t actually know. He just knows the situation around him seems to get crazier, more complicated, every day, and he feels like he’s drowning in it, and he has no idea how he’s gonna navigate his way out.

Weirdly, he finds himself wishing he could sneak back down to his quarters and talk to Cas.

Weirdly, because just the fact that Cas exists is proof that the world Dean lives in isn’t what he always believed it was. Whether Cas is telling the truth, or lying to him to cover up something else—though Dean still can’t manage to believe that, can’t think about Cas’s voice and convince himself that it could tell him lies—the thought of speaking to him shouldn’t be a relief. Dean should approach it with caution, same as he does everything else around here.

Maybe it’s just that Cas has never suggested that Dean’s crazy, or dumb, or exaggerating; has never given him a job he didn’t feel up to or failed to trust him with the truth.

The guy’s just a voice on the radio, barely real. Dean doesn’t have to prove anything to him.

Yeah. That must be it.

 

 

 

 

He doesn’t bother heading back to his quarters to shower or change before dinner. By the time he’s waited for everybody else to leave the office, it’s late; the canteen closes in a half-hour, and he still has to go see Sam and Jess this evening.

He can’t leave the note from Krissy’s package in the evidence box for the others to find. He knows that, even if he doesn’t for sure know why. But he doesn’t want to carry it around on his person or sneak it away in his quarters, either. Being caught with seditious materials—that’s a one-way ticket to cleaning.

In the end, Dean pulls the heavy copy of the Order out of the desk drawer, and tucks the note in between the pages in one of the boring-as-fuck middle sections, health and safety or something like that. Not exactly a long-term hiding-place, but it’ll do for tonight. Until he speaks to Krissy, finds out what's going on.

He’s surprised when he crosses over to the canteen and finds Sam still sitting there, alone, empty tray on the table in front of him.

He’s even more surprised that Sam is sitting with his back to the door, looking right at the viewscreen.

“What you doing up here?” Dean asks, plunking his tray down on the table in front of Sam, inserting himself into Sam’s view of the screen. He doesn’t know if he means it to be an accusation or not.

Either way, it pulls Sam out of his thoughts, makes him squint across at Dean with that expression that means he’s exasperated, but too tired to fight about it. “Thinking,” he says.

“Huh.” Dean pushes at a lump of reconstituted mashed potato with his fork. “About what?”

Sam sighs, falls silent for a moment. “You know, I used to come up here every night,” he says, at last. “When I started shadowing. That’s how Jess and I got talking.”

He’s looking past Dean, eyes on the viewscreen again, and Dean’s “Yeah?” comes out sharp.

“Yeah. We’d both just started in IT. She was homesick for the mids and she couldn’t sleep, so she took a walk, and she found me sitting up here.”

“Enjoying the view?”

Sam cuts a glance at him. “I used to look at the stars.” He shrugs, glancing down at his tray. “Draw them, sometimes. It was clearer, a couple years ago. You could really _see_ them, some nights.”

“Never figured you for dreaming about what’s up there.” Dean narrows his eyes. “Ain’t that stuff off-limits for you? IT are sticklers for the Order, right?”

Sam raises his eyebrows, but he doesn’t make the obvious dig about how that’s supposed to be Dean’s job now. He just shrugs and says, “Yeah.”

“That why you stopped?”

“No.”

“So—”

Sam’s sigh cuts him off. “Why do you think I stopped, Dean? Same reason you’re sitting with your back to the damn thing.”

“Dad,” Dean says.

Sam doesn’t answer, a scowl tugging down at the corners of his mouth.

“You’re angry at him,” Dean realises, then. “You’re angry at him for taking your stargazing away from you. Seriously?”

Sam keeps on looking past him. “Sometimes I’d see him at the door, after he finished work,” he goes on. “He never came in to talk to me.” He hesitates. “And when he finally did, I thought he was crazy. I told him to drop it, even though I knew he wouldn’t listen.” He meets Dean’s eyes, then, and his lips thin. “So yeah, I’m angry. But not just at him.”

Well, now Dean feels like a real asshole. “Sam,” he begins. “I—”

Sam cuts him off with a shake of his head. “Don’t,” he says. “I get it.”

He pauses. Dean shoves a forkful of possibly-once-potato mush in his mouth and swallows as he watches Sam collect his thoughts.

“I came home early today,” Sam goes on. “Said I wasn’t feeling too good. I started looking through Dad’s files, and I found something that—well, it made me wonder.” He glances back at the viewscreen.

Dean stops eating. “What’d you find?”

Sam stands, abruptly; picks up his tray. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll show you.”

 

 

 

 

“Order sheets? Imaging technology? That stuff doesn’t even really exist, does it?” Dean waves a sheet of paper, dense with notes in Dad’s writing. “Sammy, this shit makes no sense.”

“That’s what I thought,” Sam agrees. “When I started looking through this stuff, I couldn’t figure out why Dad kept half of what he did. What it has to do with arrest records, with people who were sent to cleaning.”

“So, you gonna enlighten me?”

“That room you found this morning. I asked Ruby about it.”

“…Okay?”

“And she just said, ‘Sam, you know cleaning suits are the only thing we make up here.’ Which, yeah, we do—but that’s over on the other side of the section. Why we’d need a whole secret room for them, I got no idea.” Sam pauses. “So, I waited until she went for lunch, and I took a look myself.”

“And?”

“And I found some stuff in there that didn’t sit right with me.” Sam’s brow furrows, like he’s reliving his puzzlement all over again. “We’re supposed to make the cleaning suits, but Supply send up the materials. So why are we making our own heat tape? And there was other stuff. Graphic imaging processors, like we use to produce images on a computer screen, only they were in the same workshop with the heat tape. I couldn’t see why we’d need any of that stuff.”

“Me either.” Dean waits for him to go on. There has to be a point somewhere in here, right?

“Anyway,” Sam says, “You remember I asked you to send up that heat tape?”

Dean nods.

“It was total coincidence, really—Ruby was busy in the server room, so I signed for a delivery from Supply. Only I looked into the cleaning suits workshop later, and the amount of heat tape that was in there—it was way more than could’ve fit in the package. It looked like more than the guys making cleaning suits were ever gonna use—honestly I don’t know why we make so many, anyway—so I sneaked some to fix the piping in Jess’s quarters.” Sam frowns. “But the stuff disintegrated soon as I tried to use it. So, I tried again, with the stuff you sent me from Mechanical. And that was fine.”

Dean shrugs. “So, you had a shoddy batch. Happened to us last week.”

Sam’s expression turns curious. “You happen to notice if it was in an unmarked box?”

“Huh.” Dean frowns. “Come to think of it, yeah. So?”

“So, I think there might have been a mix-up. That wasn’t from Supply. It was from here.”

Dean remembers the unmarked boxes in the workshop, his brain trying to form a picture out of what Sam is telling him. It’s incomplete, but Dean’s pretty sure that when he can see it clearly, it isn’t gonna be pretty.

“You’re saying IT is making shitty heat tape—on purpose?” he says, slowly. “For the cleaning suits?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Dean’s stomach drops. But possibilities leap through his head, too. If the cleaning suits are faulty on purpose—does that mean somebody could survive outside, with one that wasn't built to fail? That Dad was really onto something?

But it’s still not _safe_ out there. They’re not lying about that, not completely. Dad is still dead.

Unless—

“But, that imaging stuff,” Dean says. “Does that mean—Did Dad think—”

“He thought the viewscreen was a lie,” Sam confirms. “That it’s safe up there, and IT’s manipulating the view somehow, telling us otherwise to keep us in line. Christ knows why.” His face hardens, then. “But I don’t think that’s it.”

Dean tries to keep the disappointment off his face. It doesn’t work, clearly; Sam reaches out as if to touch his shoulder, aborts the gesture and draws his hand back.

“I know you want to believe he was onto something, Dean,” he says, gently. “I do too, believe me. And—I think he was onto something. Just not what he thought.”

“Just tell me,” Dean gets out.

Sam pauses, gathers himself up. “The processors I found,” he says. “There were a whole bunch of them. Little ones. No point having that many for a single big screen. But if they were being put in the visors of the cleaning suits, changing what people see through them? That would make sense.”

Dean thinks, with a sinking feeling, of Dad’s smile through the airlock door. _I’m gonna be fine_ , he said. He damn well believed it, too.

“I’m gonna check it out as soon as I get the chance,” Sam is saying. “Find out what’s going on.”

Dean nods, numbly. The lie—it’s bigger even than he thought, more complicated. Makes him feel like a rat in a trap. And his world may be a mess of confusion right now, but he’s sure of this one thing. They’re all fucked.

He stands abruptly, rubbing his eyes. “I’m gonna turn in,” he says.

Sam nods. “I’ll walk with you,” he says.

Halfway down the corridor, he stops. Dean blinks, then realises that they’re outside the door to what’s technically Sam’s own room, though it seems like he stays with Jess most of the time.

“Come in for a minute?” Sam asks.

Dean follows him in, hovering and turning over the few possessions scattered around the place while Sam rummages in a drawer. It’s pretty sparse; not exactly homey. But there’s a photograph propped up on the nightstand. It’s wrinkled and faded, and Dean picks it up carefully.

Mom in the hospital. The same picture he has. He didn’t know Sam had a copy, too.

“Here.” Sam’s voice breaks into his thoughts. He’s holding out a sheet of paper—a whole sheet, not faded or crumpled, with nothing on it but a drawing.

 _Outside_. Sam isn’t exactly the world’s greatest artist, but he’s made an okay job of it. It must’ve been painstaking work. Dean recognises the lay of the land, the familiar rocks, the bank. The spot where Mom’s body lies. The place where Dad fell.

The sky above is sprinkled with dots, some of them joined together so they make apparently random patterns. Dean squints at them for a moment before he realises they’re stars. The biggest of them hangs right above the place where Mom lies.

There’s a little circular design in one corner of the drawing, four points on it marked off with ‘North’, ‘East,’ ‘South,’ and ‘West’. Sam leans in to indicate the biggest star with the tip of his finger.

“The Ancients used the stars to navigate with,” he says. “To get around the outside world. This one—they called it the Pole Star. It meant North. If you could find that in the sky, you could find your way.”

Dean looks at him curiously. “How’d you know that?”

Sam sighs. “Ruby let me take a look at some stuff,” he says. “When I started up here. Back then, I—I thought she was just being a friend.” His shoulder sag. “Now I’m not so sure.”

“You think she was trying to get you onside? Bribe you?”

“I dunno. Maybe.”

“Why’re you showing me this?”

Sam shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “Guess I just—felt like I should.”

“Okay,” Dean says. But he’s starting to get it.

Sam dreamed about the outside world, too. About exploring it, even. Sometime, even if he never admitted it, he believed Dad, too.

 

 

 

 

It’s late, when Dean gets back to his quarters. He’s tired, but Jess’s earlier warning sticks with him, and he has the presence of mind to check his room for bugs before he turns on the radio.

He wonders if it’s really safe to do so at all, if he wouldn’t be better off forgetting about Cas and just getting some shuteye, but somehow he feels like maybe he’ll sleep easier tonight if he just talks to somebody.

Okay, not just somebody. Cas.

He listens to the crackle of the radio in the dark, only realises how nervously he’s been waiting when Cas’s voice says, _Hello, Dean_ out of the static and he finds himself letting out a sigh of relief.

“Hey, Cas,” he says. It comes out ragged, all of the exhaustion of the day leaking through.

 _Dean_. Shit, Cas actually sounds like he’s worried. _Dean_ , he says, again. _Are you okay?_

Dean almost laughs. He doesn’t know that anybody’s asked him that since the cleaning. Not that he can blame them. Nobody’s okay these days.

He opens his mouth to say, _Sure_ , but it decides without his input that he’s done holding things together for tonight, and he finds himself confessing, “Uh. Not really.”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line, and his insides clench uncomfortably. Maybe Cas was just being polite; maybe he doesn’t really give a crap.

Dean’s just a voice in the ether for him, too, after all.

Then—uncertain, like he’s not sure it’s the right thing to say—Cas asks, _Do you want to… tell me about it?_

“Don’t think I should be telling anybody about it,” Dean says, hopelessly, but he’s so tired, he’s so fucking tired and he doesn’t know what to do, and before he can engage his brain he’s saying, “So, you know I told you I saw somebody die yesterday?” and the whole sorry tale is flooding out of him, all the helplessness and anger and loss of it.

He shouldn’t be sharing this stuff. But it’s weirdly freeing, just letting himself say it, letting it be real. Like exorcising a ghost. And Cas—well, he’s actually a pretty good listener, not interrupting, just prodding gently at him with an encouraging, _Yes?_ every now and then.

Dean’s never been religious, aside from Bobby occasionally dragging him and Sam up to Pastor Jim’s sermons when they were kids. But right now he thinks he’s starting to see the appeal of confession.

“…So,” he finishes. “I don’t know where the fuck I am anymore. I just—man, I wish Dad was here. He might have a clue what to do, because I sure as hell don’t.” He looks down at his hands, which is dumb, because it’s not like Cas can see his embarrassment—though he can probably hear it clear as anything. “Fuck, I’m useless.”

 _Dean_ , Cas says, then, and his voice is heavy with sadness.

It’s enough to surprise him out of his exhaustion, and he glances up at the radio. “What?” he says.

 _Dean_ , Cas says, again, and the vehemence of it is unexpected. _This is not your fault. It is not on you._

“Well, who else is gonna fix it? Ellen? Her hands are tied. Sam? IT’ll have his ass if they start thinking he knows anything.”

A sigh. _Maybe nobody. But Dean. You’re a good man—_

He raises an eyebrow. “How do you figure?”

_You’re clearly a good man, and you don’t deserve to carry all of this. This responsibility—it’s too much for one person._

A pause, and when Cas speaks again, his voice is firm. Like he’s decided something.

_But since you have it, I’m going to tell you everything I know._


	6. Chapter 6

__

 

_The Ancients saw the end coming. That was why they built the silos._

_I don’t know what that end was. Maybe it was natural disaster; maybe it was war. The weapons the Ancients had could do that. I’ve seen pictures—the aftermath of old wars. Smoke and flame, dust blossoming in great clouds toward the sky. Cities the size of a dozen silos lying in rubble. Scorched earth stretching as far as the eye could see._

_The earth was angry, too, I think. Maybe the Ancients brought it on themselves. Up on the surface, there were places where the ground could shake and split apart, swallowing everything above it. Where water—more water than you or I can even imagine—could rise up to cover the ground, turn streets into rushing torrents. There were winds that could lift the roofs off of buildings, diseases that tore through towns._

_It could have been any of those things that ended it all. I don’t know._

_But the Ancients meant for their descendants to inherit the earth, after the end had come and gone. They built the silos to keep us in, so that one day, some of us would walk the surface again._

_They never expected all of the silos to survive. They knew that some would tear themselves apart, some would fall to disease—and some would start thinking for themselves, and have to be destroyed._

_That’s what Silo One does. They control everything. They can kill a silo at the touch of a button. Some of the silos that went dark—that’s what happened. The lights didn’t just go out. They were extinguished._

Dean blinks at the radio. Cas’s low, solemn voice has had him entranced, winding itself around his consciousness, digging down into the fabric of him and holding him there. The words ‘went dark’ are what jolt him out of it.

“You said your silo went dark,” he points out. “You’re still alive.”

 _Ours was one of the first_ , Cas tells him. _The first generation, the people who were herded down into the silos before the end—the silo heads drugged them, to make them forget their old lives, to prevent them ever questioning why they were here, how anybody knew to shut them away._

_But there were those who realised and refused. Those who remembered. Some of them lived in our silo, and, they began to ask questions._

_So Silo One pressed the button. We were all supposed to die. Our Father saved us._

Dean can actually hear the uppercase in Cas’s voice as he says that, _Our Father_. As he goes on, the narrative starts to sound like something rote-learned and recited back, like a kid in a classroom learning the Order, with a measured cadence that doesn’t match the total fucked-upness of the story.

_Our Father was second in command to the silo head. He overheard a conversation and realised what was going to happen, and that he was powerless to prevent it. So he took the children of the silo, as many of them as he could gather, and locked them in the server room—the only safe place left. And afterwards, while the equipment failed with nobody to tend it, and the survivors killed each other over food and water, he guarded the children._

_When the last shot had been fired, when the last survivor on the outside had fallen, he led the children out, into the silo they had inherited. He shared with them the information the silo head had kept hidden. He taught them how to work the generator; how to grow food; how to listen over the radio as the other silos went dark, one by one._

_And he taught them about the outside world—about how it was in the time of the Ancients. He was certain that they would need to know, one day—or, at least, that their children would. They would survive in secret, below the radar of Silo One. He was determined. They would live while the savages in the other silos tore one another apart, and they would deserve to live._

_The children Our Father saved were our ancestors. It is our duty to follow the ways Our Father set out for us; to remain strong and patient and virtuous. And when the surface of the world is safe for men to walk on again, it is we who will inherit it._

There’s a pause. Cas clears his throat, an embarrassed little sound in the silence.

 _At least_ , he amends, _that is what we are taught._

The change in his tone is enough to bring Dean out of his stunned silence. He swallows. “You sound like you ain’t so sure you believe it,” he says. “What gives?”

 _I believe—most of it is true_ , Cas tells him. _I have seen the records. The Legacy left by the Ancients. But—_

“But?”

_The way my brothers and sisters have always spoken of the other silos—I thought the people in them would be animals. Bloodthirsty, uncivilised, blind and stupid._

_And then I spoke to you._

Dean snorts, a bitter little sound. “Well,” he says. “I ain’t winning any prizes for my brains anytime soon, that’s for sure.”

A soft, exasperated noise comes out of the radio. _You are a good man_ , Cas tells him, like he can make it true if he just repeats it enough. _You care. You hurt. You are as human as I am._

Cas pauses, and when his voice comes again, it’s hesitant.

_I could not be happy at the thought of you dying. It—hurts me._

Dean finds himself looking at the radio in disbelief. Why? Cas doesn’t even know him, not really. Pretty much all he’s ever done is complain to the guy.

Saying any of that would feel like a step too far, though. Dean’s done enough spilling of guts for one night. So he stomps down on the impulse to argue, forces a laugh and says, “Man, that’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me all year.”

Cas’s kidding radar seems to be broken, though, because after a moment he says, quite seriously, _I am sorry._

Dean squeezes his eyes shut. It’s weird enough that the otherworldly voice on his radio belongs to a real person. That that person gives a crap about him—well, it’s tough to wrap his head around.

“So,” he manages, eventually. “Cas—don’t get me wrong. I appreciate you telling me all of this, I do. It makes sense of some stuff. But I dunno what I’m supposed to do with it.”

 _If you are to remain safe_ , Cas says, _I would advise ignoring it._

“Remain safe?” Dean quirks a humourless smile. “Think it’s a little late for that.”

Cas sighs, but, _I understand_ , he says. _Still. Be careful. Please._

“Sure,” Dean says. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, having somebody who doesn’t need anything from him tell him to take care, just because. Unfamiliar, but somehow it makes the weight in his chest ease a little, makes him feel like maybe, if he closes his eyes right now, he might manage to catch a little sleep. “I'm gonna head to bed,” he says, into the radio. “Night, Cas.”

 _Goodnight, Dean_.

The radio shuts off. It’s only then that Dean realises he has his hand pressed to the wall—as though Cas might be able to feel it, through the walls of their silos and through the density of the earth, in another world.

 

 

 

 

“I already told you, okay?” Krissy’s scowl intensifies. “My dad’s sick. I wanted to go see him, so I needed the extra chits. That’s it.”

Dean casts a quick glance towards the door. They have a couple minutes before Garth gets back from his coffee run, by his calculations. Garth may not be as quick on the uptake as Rufus is, but he’s still a relative stranger, and one who likes to talk. Dean isn’t gonna risk letting anything slip in front of him.

“Krissy,” he says, doing his damnedest to maintain his fraying patience. “You know that ain’t what I’m talking about.”

“Don’t know what you _are_ talking about,” she counters.

“The note, Krissy. You know.” He reaches into the pocket of his coverall and pulls it out, unfolding it so she can see the message clearly. “ _This_ note.”

She crosses her arms. “I don’t pack the stuff up, I just deliver it. How should I know how it got in there?”

“I just need you to tell me where it was supposed to go.”

She looks back at him dubiously.

“Krissy, passing stuff like this around, it’s _sedition_. You could get in real trouble.” She’s just a kid, and Dean feels like a Grade-A asshole for threatening her, but it’s not like he has a choice. “That happens, you can say goodbye to any extra time with your dad.”

Krissy sags in her chair, sullen-faced, but after a moment she meets his eyes.

“Look,” she says, “I don’t know much, okay? I don’t know who this stuff is for. Somebody just slipped me a note one day, on the stairs. It was crowded, and I—I didn’t see who. It said they knew what I was doing, with the black market stuff from Supply, and if I wanted to earn some _real_ extra chits, I could fake another order and put it in a drop-box on Sixteen. It’s just a box, no address. I never saw anybody open it.” She looks down. “That’s all I know. I swear.”

Dean’s pretty sure she’s telling the truth. He knows the expression on her face. It’s defeat.

 

 

 

 

Krissy leaves with a twenty-chit fine and a warning, same as the kid down in Supply. It’ll be up to her caster whether she gets to keep on shadowing as a porter, but from the filthy look the guy shot Dean and Garth as they left, he guesses she won’t get in too much trouble. He keeps his expression stern as he can, doing his best not to let on that that’s a relief.

He keeps quiet about the note. There aren't enough people in the Sheriff’s office to keep an eye on that drop-box around the clock, even if Dean could come up with a reason that doesn’t sound suspicious or nuts. Still, he makes a mental note to check on the damn thing as often as he can.

The rest of the day is pretty uneventful. There’s a shouting drunk on Twelve who gets his liquor confiscated and a couple hours in the cells to cool off, but the lost pay and the ass-kicking he’s gonna get from his section head tomorrow will be all the punishment he needs. Aside from the half-hour it takes to deal with that, Dean spends most of his time poring over the Order again, tucking the note in between lesser-thumbed pages when he gets the chance to do so without being spotted.

Early in the evening, a porter shows up with a note from Jody. She’s overnighting on Thirty-Five, it tells them, and she’ll be up tomorrow afternoon.

A little of the tension knotted up in Dean uncurls itself, reading that. He can’t share the real reason he’s up here with Jody, but at least the day job will be a little easier with someone around who commands a little more respect than he does.

After work, he heads up to the cafeteria. He joins Sam and Jess at their table, and they keep their conversation carefully inconsequential. It’s tough. There are about a million questions he wants to ask, and it’s obvious they’re itching to answer. Sam sits there with coiled-up tension evident in every part of his frame, and Jess’s eyes are bright, her gestures more emphatic than usual. They’ve found something, that’s for sure.

They leave first, and Dean hangs around a little longer, grabs another cup of coffee. Alone, he gets even more discomfited, the feel of not knowing who’s watching him like an itch at the back of his skull. He forces himself to sit still, counts down ten minutes before he judges it’s safe to follow.

 

 

 

 

“It’s the visors,” Jess tells him, as soon as he’s safely inside the room.

“Yeah,” says Sam. “And it isn’t what Dad thought.”

Dean looks at him.

“The lie—it isn’t what we see through the viewscreen. That poisoned wasteland out there? It’s real. But you put on one of those cleaning suit helmets, and everything’s—well, it’s—”

“Beautiful,” says Jess. “The image files we found. Like something out of a kids’ picture book.”

Sam nods agreement. “Blue sky, greenery, light in the sky—the opposite of what we’re looking at. Seriously, the lab, it looked—well, it’s hard to explain. Like a whole other world.”

“Okay,” Dean says. He can’t picture it, really, but the way the two of them are looking at him, the light in their eyes—he believes them, no question about that. The biggest question he does have is, “Why? If somebody does think the viewscreen’s a lie—why bother tricking them once they’re already out there? When they’re already gonna—” He forces the word out. “Die?”

“To make sure they do?” Sam suggests. “Think about it. Somebody goes out to cleaning and thinks they’re in paradise—they’re not gonna run back to the door and renounce the error of their ways, beg to be let back in. If people did that all the time, cleaning would start to look pretty damn barbaric.”

Dean inclines his head. “I guess?” he says. It doesn’t seem like enough, though, somehow.

“Or to make sure we see they’re wrong,” Sam goes on. “If somebody’s convinced it’s safe up there, and we see them die, then we’re gonna think they’re crazy. We see they were wrong about that, so we assume they were wrong about everything.”

“Makes sense.”

“Plus there’s the actual, you know. The cleaning.”

“What do you mean?”

“The viewscreen—that’s a big part of what keeps people in line, right? Being able to see the surface, how dead it looks. We believe our eyes. Dad was the exception; most of us look at it, and we think, hey, it’s lucky we’re safe down here. If the cameras got covered up, people might get to wondering. So people refusing to clean—that’s a problem. Haven’t you ever wondered why everybody who gets sent to cleaning actually cleans?”

“Almost everybody,” Dean corrects him.

“Yeah.” Sam deflates a moment. “Almost. Point is, though—if you think you’re safe up there, fine and dandy, you’re not gonna begrudge a couple minutes wiping off a camera. You might even try to send a signal to your friends, your family, tell them _it’s okay, come on up_. But if you knew you were gonna die up there, why would you spend your last couple minutes doing a favor for the people who hung you out to dry?”

“Guess you’re right.” Dean lets out a sigh.

Dad was wrong. The hope that the viewscreen was a lie—that Dad wasn’t really lying dead out there—was always a pretty dumb one. He knows that. Still, having it confirmed makes him feel heavier, tireder.

“The thing I don’t get,” Sam goes on, “is, if what we see up there is what we get—then what is Ruby hiding?”

Dean should tell him. Everything he knows, everything Cas told him. Even if Sam doesn’t believe him; even if it makes him sound crazy; even if it feels like excising the last private piece of himself he has left and holding it up for ridicule. Sam and Jess deserve to know.

He shakes his head. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Well,” Sam says, determined. “I’m gonna find out.”

Dean opens his mouth to say something— _be careful_ , or _don’t let Ruby find out_ —when there’s a noise, out in the corridor.

They all freeze. As one, they turn, toward the door. Jess, sitting closest, takes tentative hold of the handle; pushes it down without a sound and opens the door. There’s nobody there.

“You think they heard anything?” Sam says.

Dean looks at him, grimly. “I dunno. We gotta assume it’s a yes.”

“I’ll take responsibility,” Jess says.

They both look at her.

“You’re closest to Ruby,” she points out, to Sam. “She’s been grooming you for her second-in-command since you started shadowing. Why do you think Tammi wants to scratch your eyes out? She lets her guard down in front of anybody, it’s gonna be you. So if they ask about sneaking into the lab, looking at the visors? It was my idea.”

“Jess,” Sam protests, “I can’t let you do that.”

She plants her hands on her hips. “You won’t _let me_ do anything, Sam Winchester. My decision, because I’m the one with the common sense around here.” And she looks at Dean, all _back me up here_.

“She’s right, Sam,” he says, with reluctance. “You’re in the best place to keep an eye on Ruby.”

Sam sighs. “Fine,” he says. “But Jess, if you get in trouble, I’m telling her.”

She concedes with a nod.

“I should go,” Dean says. “Doesn’t look good for you two hanging out with me all the time, not if Ruby’s got people watching you.”

Sam nods. Dean’s halfway out the door as he hears Sam say, quietly, “Be careful.”

 

 

 

 

He sits up late listening to the hiss of the radio. No friendly voice comes over the airwaves tonight, and Dean turns over and over in his sleep, unable to get comfy. All the worries, all the stuff that’s roiling in his head—he can’t get it out.

He sits up, presses the flat of his hand to the wall. “Cas,” he whispers, into the silence, too tired to care how dumb it sounds. “Wish you were here, man. I could use a friend.”

 

 

 

 

He gets one, the next day.

Jody Mills, with her close-cropped hair and laugh-lines, the warmth in her eyes belying the easy authority with which she walks on into the office and introduces herself like she belongs there.

Okay, Dean can’t _tell_ her all about what’s going on. But not being the focus of all that attention anymore, not having all that pressure on his shoulders—it makes him realise exactly how much he’s been struggling to hold it up.

Jody takes on the couple misdemeanors they have to deal with throughout the day, leaving Dean to carry on studying the Order. Which is fine, until it’s so boring his brain starts to melt.

After a while, the words start blurring into each other, sentences that read similarly enough that he can hardly tell where one ends and the next begins. And all that white space around them. So much paper—hard to imagine a whole world full of forests to make it out of.

Maybe the Ancients just wanted to preserve a remnant of that, when they set down how they thought the world ought to be. A little bit of how it was.

Dean can understand that. But he thinks about what Sam and Jess told him—write things down, keep what you’ve discovered where IT won’t find it—and after a moment’s consideration, staring at the page, he picks up a pencil.

He turns to the same section where he hid the note, one that nobody would read if they didn’t have to. In the faintest of handwriting, in-between the lines, he starts, _Sammy, if you’re reading this, then I’m probably in trouble. Maybe they even sent me to cleaning._

_Anyway, there are some things I haven’t told you yet._

 

 

 

 

He’s still absorbed in his task an hour later, when the corridors around him are starting to empty of people and he hears footsteps running toward the office.

Dean starts guiltily, slamming the Order shut on his thumb. He grimaces, shakes his hand in the air. The door opens.

But it isn’t Jody, or Rufus, or any of Ruby’s underlings.

It’s Jess. She stands stock-still in the doorway, looking at him with wide, frightened eyes.

“Sam,” she says. “It’s Sam.” She gasps for breath. “We were on different shifts today—Ruby switched them, last minute. But he should’ve been home by now.” She clasps her hands together. Their knuckles are white. “He should be home by now.”


	7. Chapter 7

 

Dean is on his feet before he’s even really aware of it, his copy of the Order forgotten on the desktop, feeling like his heart just dropped out the bottom of his stomach and kept on plummeting.

“Fuck,” he says. It’s about the only thing that sums up the situation.

Jess doesn’t answer, but her stricken expression says it all. 

“Come on.” Dean jerks his head towards the door. “We’re gonna find out what happened.”

Details, safety, keeping things quiet—all of that is gonna have to come second. Ruby and whoeverthefuck else in IT is in on the lie—they have Sam. They have Sam.

Jess finds her voice again, breaking in on his tunnel vision. “How are we gonna do that?”

Dean fingers his badge, casts a glance at the door to the cells on the far side of the Sheriff’s office—the ones where people about to be sent to cleaning are kept.

He can’t threaten IT with that. But.

His gaze travels around the room, lands on the locked cabinet above Dad’s desk. Nobody’s used guns in the silo in years—since the last bout of violence, when Dean was a kid. Dad showed him how to shoot one—in theory—when he was small, after the people with covered-up faces came in the night to take Mom and Dean was terrified they’d be back for the rest of the family next. He’s never actually had to do it, though. Not exactly a top priority: Jody never carries, and Henriksen didn’t bother even when he came down to the mids.

Still. Desperate times.

Dean fumbles in the top drawer of Dad’s desk for the key. He gets the cabinet open. There’s no time to linger on the details, to think about which is gonna fit most comfortably in his hand, be the easiest to aim, have the smallest kick-back. He just grabs the nearest one and gets loading.

That’s when Jody walks in.

Dean freezes where he stands, feeling her sharp eyes on him. Jess starts and turns to look at her.

“Deputy Winchester,” Jody says, and the gentle, good-humoured tone of voice she uses for anyone who isn’t a suspect has hardened into steel. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Dean feels his shaking fingers tighten reflexively around the gun he’s loading; he drops it before he can accidentally let off a shot, and it skitters across the office floor. Jody stops it with her foot and bends cautiously to pick it up. She removes the clip and sets it down on the desk, not once taking her eyes off his face.

“Dean,” she says. “I’m waiting.”

He shuts his eyes and sucks in a breath, grabbing the desk to steady himself. Jody’s right, and whatever rational part of his brain is left knows that. He needs to find out what’s going on here. He can’t just run down to IT and go in there half-cocked, waving a gun and making threats. Won’t help Sam. Won’t help any of them.

So what can he do?

At last, he looks up, mind racing as it tries to sort through the facts, find the ones that are safe to share and keep the rest of it quiet.

All he comes out with, in the end, is, “Sam. I—something’s happened to Sam.”

Jody crosses her arms. “And you didn’t come find me _why_ , exactly?”

It’s the same tone of voice Bobby used to use when Dean was a shadow, and he fucked something up because he was hungover or flirting or worrying. The part of Dean’s brain that’s had it up to here with sceptical looks and being called _rookie_ and _kid_ wants to protest that. He isn’t bending the rules because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s got _reasons_.

But it’s a lot better than the alternative. And on the list of things Dean has to worry about right now, his pride is way down near the bottom.

He sighs. “Guess I freaked out,” he says, and the embarrassment that colours his cheeks, he doesn’t have to fake. “Everything’s so fucked up around here, and the thought of Sammy being next—” He shakes his head. “I just didn’t think is all.”

Jody watches his face intently, but after a moment, her expression relaxes. “Don’t think you’re off the hook,” she warns him. “I’m kicking your ass tomorrow morning. But right now, this is what we’re gonna do.” She looks between Dean and Jess. “One of you is gonna explain. From the beginning.”

 

 

 

 

“I can’t believe you dragged me out of bed for this.”

Ruby stands with her arms crossed in the doorway to the Sheriff’s office, radiating wounded innocence like a forcefield.

There are dark circles under her eyes, though, and her coverall is buttoned up wrong. Her glare darts between Dean, Ellen, and Jody, like she’s not sure which of them she’s supposed to be facing off with. First time Dean’s seen her look anything but a hundred percent together and smug as a cat, and it gives him a little measure of bitter satisfaction.

Ellen eyes her coldly. She doesn’t look any happier about being called back up to the office after hours than Ruby is. That alone means Ruby should be quaking in her boots.

“We live in a sealed underground silo,” Ellen points out. “Excuse us for being a little concerned when one of our people goes missing.”

Ruby snorts. “Being a little late home to his girlfriend counts as _going missing_ , now?” She turns her gaze on Jess, a nasty twist to her mouth. “You hadn’t thought about any of the other reasons a guy might have for doing that?”

Jess’s hands are in fists—and yeah, Dean isn’t gonna lie to himself, he’d pay money to see her give Ruby a black eye. But she’s classier than that. She keeps it together. “Sam,” she gets out, “is not that kind of person. However much you wish otherwise.”

Ruby opens her mouth to snap something back, but Jody inserts herself between them. “Section Head,” she says, her voice low and steady. “Are you telling me that Sam Winchester left after his shift as normal today?”

Another scowl from Ruby, but she meets Jody’s gaze levelly. “No,” she says. “No, he didn’t.”

Jody sighs. “And are you telling me that he stayed willingly?”

Ruby’s smug look is a truly repellent thing. “In a sense.”

Dean can’t keep his trap shut a second longer. “In a _sense_?” he bursts out. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I made him an offer.” Her glower is gone, now; replaced by something like triumph. “Sam was… curious about the less public aspects of IT’s operations.” She casts a glance around the room, pointedly including Jess in it. “Things that are best left to the experts. I won’t bother going into the details. He got a little over-zealous. So I told him I could either report him—” She meets Dean’s eyes. “Which would’ve been embarrassing for you, right? Or I could teach him about everything we do. I’d been considering him for deputy section head anyway. He’s definitely the most promising shadow we’ve had since I became head.”

Jody eyes her with incredulity. “And that means he’s not allowed to _go home_?”

Ruby shrugs. “The training’s intensive. A lot of the information involved is on a need-to-know basis. Requires isolation. Always has.”

“It doesn’t require you _locking him in the server room_ and not even giving him the chance to talk to me about it!” Jess explodes.

Ruby just looks at her, an amused quirk to her lips. “Who says I didn’t give him the chance?”

“You’re lying.”

“Yeah, afraid not.” Ruby smiles. “And since you—” She points at Dean and Jody. “—have no jurisdiction over how my section handles its training process, and _you_ —” This time the gesture lands on Jess. “—had better start thinking about a new profession, I think I’ll go back to bed.”

“And I think kidnapping people is still illegal, whatever you think it has to do with your _training process_ ,” Dean says.

Ruby’s eyes light on him, piercing. She keeps smiling. He has her full attention now, and it’s—well, it would be a little unnerving if he was less pissed off.

“Let’s see about that, shall we?” she says, and then turns.

Her gaze lands on the copy of the Order that’s out on the desk. Dean’s heart thuds, but he’s frozen in place, watching as she makes her way over to it. She throws a challenging glance back in his direction, taking her sweet time. In his panic, he just left it there. He can’t even remember what page he left it open at, whether it was one of the ones he’s written to Sam on.

Ruby glances down at the open page. Her fingertips graze the paper, and the barest suggestion of a smile tugs at her lips. Dean digs his nails into his palms to keep from yelling something, grabbing it out of her hands and running for the down deeps. Out the corner of his eye, he sees Jess watching him, sees her expression turn to horror as it dawns on her what’s about to happen.

Then Ruby flips the page. She rifles through a couple chapters, too fast for her to be reading anything; hopefully too fast for her even to notice the faint pencil marks between the lines.

“Here we are,” she says, at last. “ _The Head of IT has complete discretion over recruitment and training procedures, and it is considered impracticable for law enforcement officials to have access to the server room unless invited._ Which you definitely aren’t.” She cocks her head. “So,” she says, and now she’s directing her words at Ellen. “Not only did you appoint a _relative_ of the man who was sent to cleaning for sedition in place of my much more sensible suggestion, he’s running around throwing accusations without even knowing the Order. Doesn’t look good for you does it?”

“We _will_ protect our own,” Ellen warns her. “You can do your damnedest to undermine me, but I will not let you harm an innocent young man.”

Ruby actually laughs. “Sam won’t come to any harm,” she says. “Promise. Just a better understanding of what’s best for the silo.” She eyes them for an uncomfortable moment. “Something you should all try sometime.”

She turns on her heel, hand on the door handle.

“I think we’re done here,” she says. She lets herself out, and stalks off down the corridor.

 

 

 

 

By the time Ruby’s gone, Ellen’s herded Jess off for a hushed conversation somewhere, and Dean’s gotten a Singer-worthy verbal ass-kicking from Jody, the canteen has been shut for hours.

Jody obviously doesn’t like Ruby any more than the rest of them do, and she looks at Dean like she _wants_ to understand what he’s so worried about. He’d like to tell her. He thinks she might believe him.

He can’t bring himself to do it. Jody’s been through more than anyone should have to—husband and son dead from the same illness within a year—and she’s never publicly complained. She works her ass off, and she’s going out of her way for him and Ellen right now, leaving her home in the mids for who-knows-how-long to deal with things up here. It wouldn’t be fair to put this on her, too.

And even if it was—well, Dean isn’t a hundred percent on it. Jody hasn’t seen the same things the rest of them have. Henriksen’s murder is an unsubstantiated rumor, far as she’s concerned. Dad’s notes might as well be the ravings of a nutjob. And the stuff Sam and Jess found out, down in IT? Yeah, a confession of entering restricted areas without permission probably wouldn’t go over too well. She’d be obliged to arrest them if she knew.

Dean’s tired and hungry, eyes gritty and head buzzing, by the time he gets back to his quarters. He thinks about not even bothering with the radio, but sleep seems as far away as ever, and he thinks the white noise is better than silence even if Cas’s voice never sounds on the other end.

But almost as soon as he flips the switch, he hears, _Hello. Dean?_

“Hey, Cas,” he says. “How’s it hanging?”

Cas pauses a moment, then gives a sigh. _Not well_ , he says, tiredly.

It’s unexpected enough that it startles Dean, makes him sit up a little.

Unexpected, because he knows so much more about Cas’s world now, but it still doesn't feel totally real to him. All the stuff Cas told him about the silos—that had the quality of a story to it. It was ancient history or rote-learned crap, like if he sat down by the radio and read the Order back to Cas. Didn’t tell him anything about what Cas does with his days, when he isn’t listening out to the radio. Who he hangs out with; whether he gets on okay with his _brothers and sisters_ ; what he does for kicks. If he does anything for kicks.

But that sigh, the quiet resignation in Cas’s voice? It’s real. It’s human. It’s enough to distract a fraction of Dean’s mind from the shit he’s in—and the shit Sam’s in, and the shit his silo is in—even if it’s just for a couple minutes.

“Yeah?” he says, softly, into the radio. “Cas, what happened?”

And then Dean’s heart is in his boots, because Cas says, _I lost a brother today._

“Oh,” is all he can manage. He feels the ache of the words in him, down to his bones; it poleaxes him into silence. “Shit,” he says, when he has words again. “Cas, I’m sorry.”

 _I was sent down to Mechanical with a message_ , Cas says. _And when I got back_ — He breaks off. He breathes loud enough that Dean can hear it; the sound of someone struggling to keep it together. _If I’d been here, I could have done something. But I was too late._

“How’d it happen?” is about all Dean can think of to ask. He doesn’t want to offer sympathy, fake sadness for a guy he never knew. He’s pretty sure Cas would see right through that. And he isn’t enough of a hypocrite to tell Cas that it’s gonna be okay, that he’ll get over it.

Cas makes a choked-off sound and says, _I’d prefer not to talk about it_. His voice steadies. _It’s—it won’t help._

Dean gets that. He really, really does. Wanting to shove it all down until you feel a little more able to deal with it. Not wanting to spill your guts, because you feel like someone’s gouged you open and they’re already hanging out. So it doesn’t hurt, to hear it from Cas.

It doesn’t.

“Okay,” he says. “That’s okay. So, uh.” He swallows, tries to think of something, anything else to say. “Were you guys close?”

 _Nobody is_ close _here_.

It’s the bitterest he’s ever heard Cas sound. Dean was pretty sure he wasn’t a hundred percent on board with the crazy ‘we-will-inherit-the-earth’ shit he was reciting yesterday, but right now he sounds _angry_.

Then he sniffs, and all of the anger drains out of his tone.

_But Samandriel was a good person. He did not deserve this._

And Dean thinks about Sam locked up in the server room—if Ruby isn’t lying, if she hasn’t already done something worse to him—and about Henriksen coughing up his lungs on the staircase, and about Dad stumbling and falling onto the waste ground outside, and he says, “Yeah. Yeah, they never do.”

He sounds as bitter as Cas does.

Maybe Cas picks up on that, because when he speaks again, his voice is a little steadier, and he changes the subject:

 _Dean_ , he says. _Talk to me?_

Dean shrugs uselessly. “I guess,” he says. “About what?”

 _Anything_ , Cas says. And then, _You. Tell me how you are. Tell me what happened to you today._

“Okay.” Dean eyes the radio dubiously. “But I’m warning you, it ain’t exactly a feel-good tale.”

 _That’s okay_ , Cas tells him. And then, startlingly, _I would listen to any story, if it were about you._

 

 

 

 

Dean doesn’t get the chance to check up on Sam the next day—or the next day, or the next. Jody watches him sit at Dad’s desk, reading over the Order and casting hopeful glances at the radio, for a half-hour or so. Then she makes her way over and perches on the edge of the desk.

She nods at the Order. “Pretty dry stuff, huh?” she says. “I remember.”

Dean gives her a weak smile.

“So,” Jody goes on. “I was thinking. Why don’t you get started on that listening station idea of yours? I’ll send down to Supply when the porter comes up. Make a list of the parts you’ll need and maybe you can even make a start tomorrow.”

“Sure,” he says, mustering up what little enthusiasm he can.

He ought to be happy about having something to do with his hands, and normally he would be. But it’s gonna tie him to the Sheriff’s office. Keep him busy, with fewer excuses to slip out. Jody’s keeping her eye on him. It’s a sympathetic eye, but it’s a watchful sympathetic eye.

Dean doesn’t get the chance to go check on the drop-box on Sixteen. He spends his days building radios and dealing with minor infractions—which is better than sitting at Dad’s desk until the words of the Order blur before his eyes, sure, but it’s still frustrating as hell.

When the office is quiet, he gets out the Order and carries on writing to Sam in the margins. Jess eats dinner with him in the canteen most evenings, sharing whatever bits and pieces she’s managed to glean from an IT friend of hers called Charlie (who Dean eventually figures out was the cheery redhead). Jess is on suspension, her clearance revoked, and her frustration shows in everything she does: how little she eats, her constant fidgeting, the way their conversations circle endlessly back over the same ground. Dean can relate.

He picks apart every message that gets sent up to the Sheriff’s office, every delivery of supplies. He sticks his head into Ellen’s office a couple times a day to ask as subtly as he can if she’s heard anything. If Sam can get a message to them, he will. Dean’s sure of it.

No message comes.

Cas doesn’t talk any more about the ‘brother’ who died, and he doesn’t press Dean for the details of what’s happening in his silo, but his voice crackles over the airwaves most nights, anyway. The few times Dean can’t fucking deal anymore and he bursts out in frustration and anxiety over the radio, Cas listens with a solemnity that’s kind of weirdly comforting. Having someone listen to him like this is important makes Dean feel like—well, like there’s solid ground out there somewhere, even if he isn’t standing on it.

A lot of the time, Cas sounds as tired as Dean feels. Sometimes they don’t even talk about the important stuff, just trade complaints about mundane shit. Dean learns that Cas hates waking up; that he takes his coffee with enough sweetener that it might as well be molasses; that one day last week his brother Gabriel tied his bootlaces together so that when he stood up he fell on his ass. ( _It wasn’t funny_ , Cas says, _I don’t understand why he thought it was funny_ , and Dean suppresses his snicker.)

He learns other things, too. Like how Cas doesn’t actually know if any of his brothers or sisters are his _actual_ brothers or sisters. Or who his parents are. That’s about the saddest thing Dean’s ever heard, and when Cas’s voice crackles a, _What’s wrong?_ over the radio, his mouth works dumbly and he can’t even begin to find the words for it.

“Don’t you get lonely?” is what he manages to say, eventually. “The whole—not having anybody who’s—yours? Who you’d do anything for?”

 _It’s strange_ , Cas muses, into the ether. _I would have said no, before._

“Before what?” Dean says.

There’s a moment’s silence, and then a noise that might be Cas clearing his throat. _Nothing_ , he says. _It’s nothing_.

Dean opens his mouth to push for an answer, but then there’s a not-Cas sound on the other end, and Cas whispers, _I have to go_ and breaks the connection.

 

 

 

 

Dean’s in the Sheriff’s office, having just about managed to clear the fog of anxiety that envelops his brain first thing most mornings these days with coffee (no creamer, three sweeteners—Christ, it’s contagious), when the message comes.

The porter who walks in—a woman in her thirties, definitely not a shadow; Ellen must’ve said something about tightening security up here—hands the bundle of messages direct to Jody. She squints down at them, picks the one off of the top and holds it out to Dean.

“Deputy? This one’s yours.”

It’s a tiny scrap of paper; more likely to be a private message than anything official. Dean has to force himself not to leap out of his chair and grab it from her, his heart racing. He’s wide awake, now. But he takes it, nods a thank-you and slips the porter a couple of chits, hopefully without betraying his nerves. His hands shake as he unfolds the message.

He gets it open. His heart stutters as he reads the words.

It isn’t from Sam.

But it’s definitely intended for Dean: his name is printed in boxy capitals on the front. There are lines of random characters down the sides, letters and numbers in apparently nonsensical order. And inside, in the same handwriting, a familiar message.

_JOHN WINCHESTER WAS RIGHT._

 

 

 

 

Dean can’t feel the blood draining from his face—can’t feel much of anything right now—but he must have gone pale, because Jody throws him a worried look and gets up from behind her desk

“Dean?” she says, her hand hovering over his shoulder. “Dean what’s going on? What’s that?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says, but fuck, it sounds weak. Like he’s protesting his innocence, only nobody’s even accused him of anything yet. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

Jody’s looking over his shoulder, and it’s too late to even think about hiding the damn thing. Dean hears her sharp intake of breath as she reads the note.

“I don’t know where this came from,” Dean promises. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

Jody takes the note from his hand, very gently. All she says is, “Me neither.”

 

 

 

 

They take the note over to Ellen together. Rufus has been off dealing with an incident down in the twenties for most of the morning, so they leave Garth to run the show. He’s irrepressibly eager to do so, knocking over the radio in his enthusiasm. Which ought to be exasperating, only right now Dean doesn’t have space left in his head for any emotions that aren’t, _Well shit_.

Not like he hasn’t wondered about the notes before. They have to be coming from somewhere, and a tiny part of him wants to believe that there really are allies out there somewhere in the silo.

People he knows? He discounts Lisa—she’s way too sensible to get involved with anything that could land her in the shit when she has Ben to take care of. But Bobby, maybe? Benny? Pam? Only, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t at least try to let him or Sam know. Get them alone and tell them, maybe hide some kind of private signal in the messages. But Dean can’t see anything like that—just random strings of letters and numbers. If it’s a code, it’s one he doesn’t know.

Still, even strangers would be better than nothing. Just the reassurance that, yeah, other people have noticed that there’s something wrong here. That the system they’re trapped in is crushing the life out of them, and everybody in it is too scared to question it. There’s just Dean and Ellen, authorities in name only and just as helpless as anybody else—and Jess, frozen out of her section, and Sam, locked away in that server room with Ruby feeding him who knows what kind of crap. (And that’s the best case scenario.)

Just not being alone in this. That would count for something. But the idea of something actually good happening in all of this mess? Hard to believe. Outside of their little circle of allies who are all just as screwed as he is, Dean has one friend he can tell his worries to, and he’s who-knows-how-many miles away, in another silo, in another world. If there is anybody out there who believes Dad was right, the chances that they could help and they’re not just a few nutjobs are slim to none.

“You heard of anything like this before now?” Jody says, and Ellen shakes her head, lips pursed in worry as she reads over the note.

“No,” she says. “But, far as these folks are concerned, I’m the enemy. I’m the one who heard him say it. May as well have sent John to cleaning myself.”

She casts a quick, troubled glance in Dean’s direction as she says it. He doesn't like the looks he’s getting, off her or Jody. They remind him of the way people used to look at him after Mom died, when they found out that Dean looked after himself and Sam like a grown-up while Dad badgered the Sheriff’s office for help and sat up late into the night drinking and going over salvaged files for clues.

Right now, Dean feels like any control he might’ve had over his situation up here is slipping through his fingers. This, plus the scene with Ruby the other day—he’s starting to look like he’s coming unhinged. Or like a dumb kid dressed up in his father’s clothes, without a clue what he’s actually doing.

Ellen takes the note, says she’ll have somebody in her office take a look at it, see if he can crack the code. _Ash_ is the name she gives, and Dean thinks it sounds sort of familiar, before he remembers that he was one of the people who showed up, briefly, the day Dad was sent to cleaning.

Jody turns to leave with an assurance that she’ll call some extra guys in from the lower security stations, have a guard put on Ellen’s office and her quarters, just in case there really are a bunch of lunatics out there likely to take it into their heads that she’s an acceptable target. She opens the door, and Dean makes to follow her.

Ellen’s hand on his shoulder stops him. He turns, and Ellen reaches past him to close the door. Her eyes are bright and sharp.

“Dean,” she says, and her tone radiates concern as much as it does warning. “There anything you wanna tell me?”

He folds his arms and looks back at her, trying not to let the hurt show on his face. “No.”

She stares at him, and he groans, shakes his head.

“Ellen, I got nothing to do with this. I swear. This ain’t what Dad would’ve wanted— some kind of weirdo secret society or something meeting up in his name? He just wanted to know the truth. Know why Mom died.” Dean squeezes his eyes shut. “Honest to God? I wish I didn’t know anything. I’d go back to the down deeps right now if I could, forget it all ever happened.”

He opens his eyes, and Ellen is still looking at him. At him, not through him. Not like she’s looking for something he isn’t telling. Her eyes are softer; sadder.

“I shouldn’t have brought you in on this,” she says to him.

Dean shakes his head. “Fuck, Ellen, I can handle it,” he says; a protest that’s automatic, he’s been saying it so much of his life. “I’m fine.” He pauses. “Just worried about Sammy.”

“I know.” She crosses her arms. “But he’s a grown man, Dean. And you’ve seen what the Order says. He wants to lock himself in IT’s isolation cell so he can run the show down there one day, that’s his decision.”

“I’m not so sure it is,” Dean mutters, and Ellen fixes him with a look.

“And what are you gonna do about that?” she enquires. “Run on down there guns blazing? Jody’ll be forced to bring you in before you ever get to talk to your brother.”

“No! Look. Ellen. I know I’ve screwed up a little lately, I do. It’s not gonna happen again. I got this, I promise.”

“Have you?” There’s that troubled look again, and Dean thinks he might actually prefer it if she got pissed. “Dean, what have we really found out here? That IT had a batch of shoddy materials, and they screw with the viewfinders on the cleaning suits? That’s shady, but it doesn’t explain why they’d be willing to kill to keep their secrets.” She sighs, rubbing her brow. “We still can’t prove anything.”

Dean wants to tell her. Man, he does. But what’s he gonna say? _A mysterious voice on the radio told me there are other silos out there and IT are trying to stop us from finding out and I don’t know why?_ Yeah, that’d really reassure her of his sanity.

Ellen looks him in the eyes. “Take a few days off,” she tells him.

He blinks at her. “Are you nuts? That note, Jody’s calling up people from the lower levels—I can’t just sit on my ass.”

“That wasn’t a suggestion,” she tells him. “Dean, this, the thing with Ruby—you understand how that looks. That it gives her excuses to question both our judgement. You need to cool off. Take a trip back downstairs. See Bobby, visit that girl of yours.”

He feels a flicker of guilt at the mention of Lisa. Her worried reply to his note about Henriksen is still sitting in a pile on his desk. Honestly, he hasn’t felt up to the task of pretending like he’s dealing, but that isn’t an excuse. Okay, they’re not _together_ -together, but she still gives a crap what happens to him, and he hasn’t given her a clue about what’s going on up here. God knows what the rumours are down in Mechanical.

“The more you keep on poking around, the more likely something is gonna to happen to your brother. Or to you. IT ain’t dumb—they won’t try offing you with poison, not this time. But if you’re that big a pain in their collective ass, they’ll get rid of you any way they can.” Ellen’s eyes flick ceilingward for a split second, and that’s all Dean needs to get her meaning.

“Okay,” he sighs. “Okay, fine. I’ll tell Jody.”

He can’t say he’s happy about being taken off the case while Sam is still in Ruby’s clutches, or about leaving his copy of the Order—way too unwieldy to sneak out under his coverall—lying around in Dad’s desk drawer, all of its incriminating margin-notes right there for suspicious eyes to read. But, as he heads down to his quarters, Dean starts to think that maybe a trip to the down deeps isn’t such a bad idea.

Ellen’s unspoken hint keeps circling in his head, and the more he thinks about it, the likelier it starts to seem. If that’s what Ruby’s planning—well, there are people he needs to speak to.

 

 

 

 

He gets his stuff packed up—not that he’s really unpacked a whole lot since moving into his quarters—and slips a note under Jess’s door to let her know where he's gone. Then he starts for the down deeps.

The rational part of his brain tells him he shouldn’t feel this way, but every step that takes him away from the up tops—every step down further into the bowels of the silo—feels like a weight off of his shoulders. It’s instinctive, feels like walking out of a trap. Now if only he could get his friends out with him, that’d be awesome.

The front desk chick on Twenty glowers at Dean as he approaches, but her eyes widen when he walks past the desk and makes for the next flight down. It takes a serious effort not to grin and flip her the bird, like a kid acting out on the last day of class. Dumb, really, because it’s not like this is a reprieve, but Dean lets himself feel it. His brain is gonna need all the vacation it can get.

His relief doesn’t last.

Dean remembers how the climb up felt suffocating, the quiet and order of the upper floors a smothering blanket closing in around him. On the way back down, he finds himself listening out for the increase in decibels that will signal he’s getting closer to the mids: kids yelling; dogs barking; the bustle of the landing markets; the smell of food and liquor and chickenshit and sweaty people.

By the time he reaches Thirty, things are as quiet as they ever are up top. There’s a landing market on Forty-Seven that he vaguely remembers Henriksen telling him runs every day except Saturdays, and he means to grab something to eat there, then maybe climb down a few more levels to camp for the night.

The stalls are sparser today, though. Maybe half the number of tables he remembers from the last time they passed through, and most of them aren’t exactly laden down with goods. A hollow-eyed woman in a porter’s coverall is arguing with one of the stallholders. Dean hears her spit something about _hoarding food like they own the place_ , but the stallholder shrugs, spreading his empty hands, and she leaves the market without buying anything.

Dean makes for the one food stall that looks to still be doing business, eyeing the unappetizing fare without much enthusiasm. The woman behind the counter looks at him with open distrust, and he can’t figure out why until he realises she’s looking at his badge.

He doesn’t remember people looking at them this way on the climb up. They kept up a cracking pace, sure, but people called out to Henriksen, and before they reached the relative quiet of the up tops, they got stopped for a chat or a complaint every few levels.

Have things really changed that much in a couple weeks? Or is it just him?

Dean buys soup and some rubbery bread to dip into it, which is about all the stall seems to have on offer. The stallholder keeps a suspicious eye on him as he finds himself a space near the stair rail and crouches down to eat, but at least she’s happy to take his chits. Dean starts to wonder if he’s gonna be a welcome customer everywhere he goes.

He unpins his badge and tucks it into his pack before he moves on.

 

 

 

 

He camps out just before the mids, tucked alone into a corner of the landing and glad that there aren’t too many other people around. Lights are out by the time he gets there, so he has to navigate by the narrow beam of his flashlight, whispering an apology when it shines in the eyes of a bearded dude sleeping way too close to the stairs.

Dean can’t see much, and he has to lay out his bedroll and arrange his pack as a makeshift pillow mostly by touch. His fingers brush the radio as he gropes around in there to arrange his belongings into the least-uncomfortable configuration he can find, and his hand lingers on it for a moment.

He’d like to hear Cas’s voice, tell him what’s going on. It’d make him sleep easier.

But drawing any extra attention to himself would be a dumb idea. Dean zips up his pack, rests his head on it and pushes at it until there’s no longer something lumpy digging into his ear. He shuts his eyes and resigns himself to another shitty night’s sleep.

He blinks his sore eyes open early, when the landing lights flicker on and the couple other people camping out on the staircase begin to stir.

It takes him a moment to realise what he’s seeing.

The landing wall’s covered in graffiti. Not exactly an unusual sight. It gets thicker the lower down the silo you travel; you can make a guess at whereabouts you are from the density of the tags and the messages. Dirty jokes, cryptic phrases, angry slogans, teenage declarations of love—they’re all there.

But it’s the newest addition that catches Dean’s eye. Stark black uppercase, spelling out a phrase that’s already way too familiar for comfort.

_JOHN WINCHESTER WAS RIGHT._


	8. Chapter 8

 

Dean doesn’t wait around to eat breakfast. He stuffs his bedroll haphazardly back in his pack, thanks his lucky stars he slept with his boots on, and gets the fuck out of there.

More graffiti covers the walls of the stairwell on the way down. It’s been scrubbed off in places, is already beginning to sprout back up in some of them. There’s a variety of messages; plenty that turn his stomach. _HARVELLE OUT_ crops up in a couple places. In others the ‘right’ in _JOHN WINCHESTER WAS RIGHT_ has been painted over with some other choice phrase. By the time Dean makes it down to the mids, his head is throbbing and he really, really wants to punch somebody.

Unfortunately for his angrier impulses, the first somebody he runs into is Pam.

It’s late enough in the morning that she’d normally be at her plot by now, but instead she’s sitting in the cafeteria, holding a no-longer-steaming coffee mug in both hands and not drinking from it. Her eyes are dark-circled, her expression vacant, and it’s a couple seconds before she registers Dean’s presence and raises her head. He comes to a cautious halt beside her table and sets down his pack.

“Hey there,” he says, when she doesn’t greet him.

A beat, and then she sets down her coffee, an unhappy remnant of her usual smile crossing her face. “Dean.”

“Yeah.” He clears his throat, gropes for something else to say. Settles for the path of least seriousness, because he’s already had a morning’s worth of serious shit and he’s already wishing he could just crawl into a hole. “Slacking off?”

“I wish.” The brief flash of humor in her voice is just that: brief. The set of her mouth turns grim, and she stands up. The metallic scrape of her chair sounds louder than it ought to, and Dean finds himself tensing. Even in the nearly-empty cafeteria, he imagines suspicious eyes on his back.

Normally, Pam’s the kind to pick up on your unease without so much as a word, ready with a reassuring pat (sometimes on the ass) or an off-colour joke—whatever you need to lighten the mood. Today, though, she ignores Dean’s troubles; just makes straight for the grow areas and beckons for him to follow.

He gets why, when they arrive at her plot.

She’s kept up a brisk pace past the other plots, so Dean hasn’t had time to really look around, to stop and figure out what he’s seeing. He’s just gotten this vague sense of—depletion, he guesses. Like, the crops are thinner than they were last time he was here, a couple weeks ago, only the growers wouldn’t normally have harvested by this time in the cycle. There are fewer people, too, and the ones he catches sight of out the corners of his eyes don’t wave at them or call out to each other across the foliage. Everything’s just a little too quiet.

Pam’s plot is half-empty, maybe a little emptier even than that. The crops that are left are the ones nearest the back wall—the ones that would’ve been hardest for thieves to get to before somebody raised the alarm. The locked crate where she keeps her supplies—tools and fertiliser—is empty, one side smashed in. And one of the awnings, sagging perilously on a broken set of supports, has been daubed with black paint.

 _HARVELLE OUT_ , reads one of the messages. Another, _COLLABORATOR._

“Real geniuses, writing in foot-high letters for a blind woman to read.” Pam’s smile is tiny, bitter.

Dean’s right back to wishing there was someone around here he could punch. “You know what it says, though?”

Her lips thin. “Oh yeah.”

“I’m sorry.” Ain’t much else he can say.

Pam sighs. “I know,” she says. “And I know it isn’t your fault.”

“You’re still pissed, though.”

She shrugs. “I’ll get over it.”

“Don’t sweat it,” says Dean. “I know the feeling.”

He remembers Dad mouthing, _It’s okay_ and then falling down motionless in the dust outside; Ellen telling him to take a break from the job she gave him; even Sam, locked up in whatever purgatory IT are using to keep him stashed away upstairs.

And yeah—yeah, he really does.

 

 

 

 

Lisa answers the door to her quarters right away, which surprises Dean. He’s made good time down from the mids, and most days, she’d still be at her shift in Medical by now.

The stairs have been pretty quiet, though, even down here. Dean wonders just how many people are staying home from work these days—and what they’re afraid of.

When she opens the door and sees him standing there, Lisa just stares. Her expression wavers from shock to pleased surprise to apprehension, and ends up somewhere in the middle of the three.

“Hey,” he says. “I—look, I’m sorry I didn’t answer your last message. I’m an asshole, believe me, I know.”

Lisa doesn’t smile, doesn’t give him a swat on the arm and tell him to stop being so down on himself, like she normally would. Instead she snaps out of her surprise, glancing up and down the corridor, then grabbing Dean’s sleeve and hustling him inside her quarters. He glances around the room, notices the pack on the table, stuffed half full of clothes, with a blink of surprise.

“Mom?” comes a voice from within the apartment. A moment later, a tousle-haired little figure appears in the door of the sleeping area. Ben’s eyes widen comically, and then he breaks into a grin, yells, “Dean!” and launches himself at the two of them full-force.

“Hey, buddy.” Dean finds himself grinning right back. Hey, at least one person in this godforsaken fucking silo is still happy to see him.

Lisa smiles faintly, but it’s gone as soon as he registers it. “Ben,” she says, in a voice that brooks no argument, “go to your room.”

“But Mom—”

“ _Now_.”

Ben deflates visibly, but he stomps off back to his room, sending an accusing look back in their direction before he slams the door. Dean does his best to convey a _sorry, kid_ with his eyebrows.

“What are you doing back here?” Lisa asks, once Ben’s safely back in his room. Her eyes are full of concern. “Dean. What’s going on up there?”

Dean lets out a sigh, sinking down onto one of Lisa’s chairs without being invited. She sits opposite him, folds her hands tightly enough that her knuckles pale.

“I don’t think I even know,” he tells her, at last. “Things are pretty rough, I can tell you that much.” He glances toward the door. “But I guess you’ve heard about that already.”

She gives a shaky almost-laugh. “You could say that.”

He sits forward, makes to take her hand, but she inches back, curling her arms in on herself.

Well. He’s probably nobody’s idea of a reassuring sight these days.

“Lisa,” he says, “Look, I get that things suck down here right now. Things suck everywhere, far as I can tell. And I’m sorry. But—you gotta tell me what’s going on down here. What people are saying.”

It’s a moment before she looks at him.

“They’re saying things are falling apart,” she says, then. She keeps her voice hushed, glances anxiously at Ben’s bedroom door every couple minutes. “They’re saying that your father—he wasn’t working alone. He was part of some organisation, some kind of a cult.”

“The hell?” Dean slams his palm down on the table, then subsides under Lisa’s reproving look. He lowers his voice. “Dad was seriously paranoid. Cut off half his friends—wouldn’t talk to Bobby or Ellen about what he was looking for. Wouldn’t even let me in on it.” He shakes his head. “No way was he some kinda ringleader.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Lisa says. “I never knew him—I’m not about to judge. But that’s what people are saying. That there’s a whole network of—of people who follow him, and they want to take over. Destroy the silo, force everybody _outside_.”

Dean scowls. “That’s crazy. People saw the cleaning. Dad _died_ out there, and half the damn silo was there to see it.”

“People believe all kinds of crazy things.”

“I guess.” Dean sighs. “So, what else are they saying?”

“Ellen’s barely keeping a handle on things up there. Some people think she’s lost it. She was nuts to appoint you as Deputy, and there’s no way you guys will be able to control the Outsiders.”

“The what now?”

“That’s what they’re calling them.” Lisa pauses. “They’re also saying she’s lost IT’s support. They’re important, and they’re pissed that she didn’t appoint that guy Walker instead.”

Dean manages a thin smile at that. “Hey, at least it ain’t all bullshit.”

“Maybe. But that’s not the point.” Lisa looks at him intently, then. “It doesn’t matter so much which of the rumours are true. The problem is that they exist. You know how paranoia spreads, Dean. How everybody feels like their section is the hardest done-by and somebody else is out to screw them over. Accusations start flying, people stop playing by the rules. The security station on 200 is full up and they’re letting people go without charge because they just don’t have space to deal with all of it. People are starting to feel unsafe, and when that happens—”

Dean’s heart sinks. “They take the law into their own hands. Yeah, I know.”

“It’s just like when we were kids,” Lisa sighs. “Our parents’ generation messed things up, and we’re no better. It’s all happening again.” She nods in the direction of the table, the half-full pack sitting on it. “I’ve already taken Ben out of classes. I’m getting ready in case we need to run.” She looks at her hands. “I just don’t know where we’ll go.”

Right now, Dean adds himself to the list of people he wants to punch. Things up top have been so fucking overwhelming—he’s barely given a thought to how the rest of the silo might be cracking apart. Sure, his world’s been turned on its head, but everyone else here has to keep on living in it. His friends have been suffering, and he hasn’t even tried to fix it. Even thinking about it makes him feel totally unequal to the task. He’s just one person, no more qualified than anybody else to deal with this mess.

He doesn’t know what kind of comfort he’s supposed to offer.

Before he can say anything, though, Lisa rubs at her eyes with a hand, straightens in her chair. “You probably could’ve used hearing that without all the panic,” she says, with a wobbly little attempt at a smile. “I know you have a lot on your plate.”

Her expression turns serious, then. She worries at her lower lip, and Dean knows what she’s gonna say before it comes out. He knows it’s the only sane thing _to_ say, given the circumstances.

“That’s why I can’t see you anymore.”

He nods, silently.

“For what it’s worth,” she goes on, “I don’t think Ellen was crazy to give you the job. You’re capable, and you’re _good_ , and it isn’t your fault your father lost his mind. But you’re a target for an awful lot of people, and I have Ben to think about. It’s not safe for us to be around you.”

A couple weeks ago, if he’d known Lisa was gonna dump his ass, he would’ve felt like crap. Okay, he might not have been seriously messed-up, the way Benny was that month he and Andrea were broken up—but he would’ve been disappointed. They weren’t serious, because neither of them has time for serious, but Lisa’s sweet, and sexy, and he likes her as a person, and he was pretty sure she thought the same about him.

Right now, though, he just feels a dull kind of resignation. He guesses it’s hard to sink any lower than rock bottom.

“I’m sorry,” Lisa tells him.

Dean shrugs. “’S okay,” he says.

Under the circumstances, it sounds so absurd that they both laugh.

 

 

 

 

Maybe it’s Lisa’s fears taking hold of him, or maybe it’s just the whole built-up effect of the trek down, but by the time Dean hears the familiar old Mechanical clatter spiralling up through the lower levels to greet him, he’s starting to dread getting back home. Once in a while he’s gotten an open stare from a passer-by on the stairs, or even a whispered _good luck_ or a question he can’t answer about things in the up tops, but they’re way outnumbered by the suspicious sideways glances, the knots of people he sees whispering behind their sleeves. He feels like he should be hiding his face.

Outside the door to Mechanical, he halts. Shuts his eyes for a minute, just listens to the noise of it—the living heart of the silo, still beating, despite everything—and breathes in. Oil, coolant, sweaty bodies, a pungent mixture that’d have anybody from the upper floors covering their nose in disgust.

Home. Dean holds on to it, just for a minute. Just a minute, before he walks through that door and finds out whether he’s even welcome here anymore.

He’s still hovering there before the door when he hears heavy footsteps hurrying down the corridor towards him, and there’s a big hand on his shoulder and a voice saying, “Winchester! What you doing down here, brother?”

Instinct has him spinning on his heel, hands raised defensively in front of his face, before his brain registers who the voice belongs to and Benny pulls him into a bear-hug that almost crushes the air out of his lungs.

“Dude, I ain’t your teddy bear,” Dean protests, shoving at him. For the first time in days, though, he finds a genuine laugh breaking out of him—from relief as much as anything. Benny lets him go, and he cracks a smile. “Though, can’t say I blame you for being glad to see me. Knew you guys were gonna be screwed without me.”

Benny gives him a good-natured thump on the arm. “And _I_ knew the up tops were gonna swell your head. How’d you even get that thing down the stairs?”

“Screw you,” Dean says, and it’s as genuine a thanks as he’s ever offered.

The moment can’t last. Benny’s expression sobers as he opens the door and motions for Dean to follow him through into Mechanical, swiping his ID to clock in for the nightshift. “So,” he says, over the noise of the generator. “You didn’t answer my question. What brings you back down here?”

Dean jerks his head in the direction of Bobby’s workshop. “Not here,” he says. “I need to ask you guys a favor.”

 

 

 

 

“You’re sure about this?” Bobby says. He’s wearing his most sceptical expression—eyes sharp as tacks, a displeased slant to his mouth. “Sounds like a whole lot of speculation to me.”

“It’s all we got.” Dean’s braced for an argument, but Bobby isn’t calling him an idiot or dismissing the whole thing outright, so he figures he’s at least in with a chance here. “Hopefully I ain’t gonna need it. Who knows? But I can’t just sit on my ass and do nothing.”

“If we help you out here,” Bobby says, slowly, “That doesn’t mean you go looking for trouble just because you get curious and you think you got an out. We clear?”

“We’re clear.”

Dean’s spilled just about everything. The parts he figures his friends might believe, anyway, so that’s everything except Cas and the other silos. God knows Bobby has no trust for IT, but expecting him to buy some bizarro story about other worlds that Dean got from a strange voice on the radio? Dean might be crazy enough to believe it himself, but he ain’t crazy enough to think that Bobby will.

Still. Dean doesn’t need Bobby or Benny to believe him about what else is out there in the world. He just needs them to believe that he isn’t paranoid—IT really is after him. And for that, they’ll help.

He lays out his bedroll on the battered couch in the corner of Bobby’s workshop, adjacent to the room Bobby sleeps in. Benny protests that he and Andrea are both working nightshifts this evening, so Dean can sleep in their quarters if he needs to, but Dean waves the offer off.

He crashed out here more than once after a shift or a late-night conversation-slash-drinking-session, and the familiar sagging cushions and the noise drifting down the corridor make him feel more at home than he has since he reached the up tops.

Only thing that’d help him sleep easier is speaking to Cas. It’s become a kind of nightly ritual, their little conversations that are half mundane detail and half total weirdness. Dean’s starting to feel like something’s missing when they don’t get to talk. Which is pathetic, he knows—like a kid unable to sleep without a bedtime story from his mom—but he can’t deny it. Cas may just be a voice in the ether, but Dean misses the guy.

It’s not enough to make him forget that he’s _home_ , though. Even if it’s just for the night, even if he’ll have to climb right back up through a hostile silo tomorrow, he’s home.

For the last couple moments before sleep claims him, Dean lays there on Bobby’s couch with his eyes closed, and pretends he never left.

 

 

 

 

It’s the following day and Dean’s buying lunch, well into his climb back up, when it happens.

The landing market is in the lower mids, and it’s busier than the one Dean stopped at on his way down. The general atmosphere in the silo isn’t any cheerier than it was yesterday, but seeing people in green and yellow coveralls bustle around between maybe two-thirds the usual number of stalls gives him hope.

The guy picking his way across the landing doesn’t really register at first. He’s a vague presence in the corner of Dean’s eye, if anything at all. But the stairway traffic begins to part around him. There’s something about the way he moves—trancelike and deliberate—and how his gaze is fixed forward, unwavering. He stops at the head of the flight leading down, raises his eyes to the ceiling.

People are turning to look, now. Dean squints over at him. Yeah, there’s definitely something off about the guy. Something unnerving in the grin that splits his face.

And then he looks right at Dean and his grin widens.

The top half of the guy’s coverall is too bulky. Frozen in place by that sudden stare, Dean only realises it as the guy slowly unzips the front of his coverall, revealing— _something_ —strapped to his torso.

Dean drops his sandwich. Takes a useless step forward—another—another—but the guy’s voice rings up the stairwell, into the deathly hush that’s taken hold of the landing.

“John Winchester was right!” the guy proclaims. “And we won’t stop until you admit it!”

And he reaches into his coverall and pulls something, and his body rips apart in a burst of flame.

 

 

 

 

Dean gets thrown backwards across the landing, goes through a stallholder’s table and hits his head against the wall hard enough that he blacks out for a split second.

He comes to with his ears ringing. Sounds are indistinct, like he’s hearing them with his head underwater. People shouting. The sickening echo of a scream as it plummets down the stairwell and fades to nothing. Figures lurch through the dissipating smoke.

His eyes and nose sting. The acrid smell in the air makes him cough. He levers himself to his feet with one hand on the wall and his right knee buckles under him, a stab of pain shooting up his leg.

Dean grits his teeth, breathes in hard against the pain, and tries again. He wobbles, but this time he stays upright. He peers through the smoke.

There are people strewn all over the landing, a couple already on their feet, moving between the human litter of prone figures. Most of them are moving. Some of them aren’t.

At the head of the lower flight of stairs, where the guy was standing, there’s a yawning hole in the landing. Twisted rails and torn off girders claw at the open space, and the stairs below shudder precariously. Dean watches with his heart thudding in his throat, fingers curling inward in a useless steadying gesture, already anticipating the sound of debris clattering down through the levels.

The staircase subsides, holds. The cluster of wide-eyed people gazing up from the lower landing shifts cautiously.

Dean turns his attention back to the people around him. Most of them look as dazed as he feels. Some of them haven’t been that lucky.

“I’m a medic,” says a voice Dean sort-of recognises, then. He blinks at the slight, dark-haired figure, and through the faint haze of remaining smoke, it configures itself into Doctor Tran. “I suggest somebody goes up to One-Ten for supplies and help.” She looks around, points at a woman in mids green who’s standing steady on her feet. “You, go.” The woman nods, sets off up the stairs at a run. “Anyone else who’s unhurt, help me. Otherwise, hang on. I’ll get to you.”

 

 

 

 

People get hurt working in Mechanical; it’s just a fact of the job. Dean’s picked up enough quick-and-dirty medical knowledge from Bobby to help with patching up the basics, so—once Doctor Tran’s decided his knee injury isn’t life-threatening and squinted into his eyes and fired a few questions at him to ascertain he doesn’t have a concussion—that’s what he does.

It’s a whirl of activity. Leaves him without a minute to think, which is a blessing, because if he did, he might not be able to get up and go on.

That guy proclaiming Dad’s name before blowing himself up. The way he’d looked right at Dean before he did it—like he knew him, like this was for his benefit somehow.

He doesn’t know what to think, so he sterilizes cuts and puts on bandages and tries to act reassuring to people who are either too dazed to know where they are, or who look at him with enough suspicion you’d think he’d stood up and cheered the lunatic on. When the woman in green comes back, with three other medics—including a young shadow who addresses Doctor Tran as ‘Mom’ and then blushes before correcting himself to ‘Doctor’—in tow, Dean hangs around trying to make himself useful, passing supplies, offering useless reassurances. The disaster seems to have shocked people into generosity, for the time being, and the stairway above the bomb site is busy with green coveralls, carrying supplies down to the wounded.

What feels like an age later, Jody shows up, along with Garth and a couple of the guys from her own security station. It probably hasn’t actually been more than a few hours. She’s pale-faced and breathless; must’ve hauled ass like a woman half her age to get down here.

She gets straight to work interviewing witnesses, her gentle voice softening grim efficiency. Garth is more with the sympathetic noises and the comforting hugs. With other people to care for, he keeps his head together surprisingly well.

Jody considers for a moment before deciding that Dean’s probably best sticking with the medics. His sense of fairness bristles at being relegated to nursemaid duty—but she’s right, and he knows it.

 

 

 

 

A couple gruelling hours later, they’re done with the questions, and Jody calls Dean and Garth aside.

The picture is grim. Seven innocent people dead, plus the psycho who blew himself up, identified as one Tyson Brady.

“You know him?” Garth asks. It doesn't sound like an accusation, just a curious question, but it makes Dean’s stomach do a flip anyway.

“No,” he says, and it comes out sounding too much like a protest for comfort.

Garth shrugs. “A couple of the survivors said it looked like maybe you did, is all.” He’s squinting like he’s genuinely confused. “That he looked at you.”

“Well, I dunno what to tell you, man. I never saw the guy before today. You think hanging around dangerous lunatics is my idea of fun?” Dean rubs at the back of his neck. He aches.

Garth holds up his hands, placating. “Hey, we don’t always get to choose who we hang out with. I had to ask.”

Dean subsides with a muttered, “’S okay,” closing his eyes for a second, and when he opens them he’s alone with Jody. His system’s running out of adrenaline, leaving him ragged, and he starts when she touches his hand. It’s shaking. He hadn’t noticed that before.

“Dean,” she says, quietly. “I’ll admit, I got antsy when I saw that note, but this? No way. Even if you didn’t look like you saw a ghost. I don’t believe you had anything to do with this.” She looks at him hard. “Neither does Garth. You got that?”

Dean sighs. His knee hurts like a bitch, and he’s simultaneously sore-eyed with tiredness and too jittery to even think about relaxing. “I got it,” he says. “Just wish you spoke for the majority, Jody.”

She sighs right back at him, but she’s either too honest or too damn tired to bother with comforting lies. “Me too, Dean,” she says. “Me too.”

 

 

 

 

The climb to the up tops is hard going. Dean’s knee has gotten worse overnight, and he slows the pace, hanging onto the stair rail for support when it gets bad. Each time they stop, Jody tries to persuade him to wait and rest up, let her worry about the fallout in the up tops and follow on when he feels up to it. Each time, he brushes her off, tells her that they can go on ahead if they want, but he’s gonna be as close behind them as he can.

They won’t leave him, though, and he finds himself grateful for the company. It’s proof that there are people in the silo—even in the up tops—still willing to stand beside him, for one thing. For another, Garth’s endless chatter keeps him from ever getting too much time up close and personal with his thoughts.

They stop off for the night on Twenty-Seven, close enough to IT that Dean finds himself feeling antsy, sitting up sleepless into the night long after Jody and Garth have turned in.

The silence is huge. Dean can feel the echoes in it, can hear that scream resonating down the staircase, and when he tries closing his eyes, he sees Brady looking at him, looking him right in the eyes as he reached into his coverall to pull the plug.

He feels like he’s suffocating.

Jody and Garth are both right there on the landing with him, sleeping on their makeshift bedrolls—put together out of whatever spare bits and pieces the locals could scrounge up. They could wake up anytime, and then he’d have a lot of explaining to do. Talking to Cas is about the dumbest thing he could do right now. He knows that.

But he reaches into his pack and pulls out the radio. Picks his way to the other side of the landing, careful as he presses his bare feet down on the cold floor.

He holds his breath, praying that the voice on the other end will belong to Cas.

There’s a low crackle, and then, _Hello, Dean_ , and it’s the relief that breaks him.

“Hey, Cas,” he whispers, and finds his voice cracking apart.

Cas is all concern, right away. _I haven’t heard from you in days_ , he says. _Are you alright?_

There are hot tears prickling behind Dean’s eyes, then, and to his horror, he can’t fight them back. He sniffs.

_Dean?_

“No, man,” he whispers into the radio, when he finally trusts his voice not to shake. “No, I’m really not alright.”

He didn’t expect Cas to be much with the expressions of sympathy, and he isn’t, but when he says, _What happened?_ his voice is gentle. Kind.

Dean shakes his head. Then he remembers himself, and says, “I can’t get into it. Not now. I ain’t alone.”

 _I wish I could help_ , Cas tells him, then, and there’s the tiniest tremor in his voice.

It takes Dean by surprise. “You do, Cas,” he says, after a minute, realising as he says it that it’s true. “Just—you being somebody who doesn’t wanna see my head on a stick. It helps.”

He scrubs at his eyes. There’s a moment’s silence, and then Cas says, out of the blue, _I was afraid of the dark, when I was small._

“Yeah?” Dean says. A little random, but at least it’s a topic that isn’t his own state of total screwed-up-ness. “Kind of a disadvantage when you live underground, ain’t it?”

 _Yes_ , Cas says, and then, _We don’t have families, in the way I think you understand it. But my sister Anna would comfort me when I cried._

“What, tell you a story about how the heroic dragon-slayer had already killed the monsters under your bed?”

A soft noise that might be a laugh. _No. She would pray with me._

“Man, your sister was a weirdo.”

 _Maybe_. It’s calm, not offended. Cas’s voice changes, then. The timbre of recitation, not a conversation.

 _Now I lay me down to sleep_ , he says,  
 _I pray the Lord my soul to keep,_  
 _If I should die before I wake,_  
 _Bless me Lord my soul to take._  
 _Now I lay me down to sleep_  
 _I pray the Lord my soul to keep._  
 _Angels watch me through the night_  
 _And wake me with the morning light._

“Huh,” is all the response Dean can manage. It’s good, he guesses, that Cas had somebody to take care of him like that, even if the idea of never having a mom or dad seems gut-wrenchingly wrong.

 _I know it’s odd_ , Cas says, at last, and he sounds a little embarrassed. _But the idea that there was something out there bigger than all of us—it meant I didn’t have to be strong enough to fight the darkness myself. I always found it comforting._

Dean’s never really been able to get his head around that kind of stuff. He isn’t exactly religious, and the idea of something bigger than him taking care of everything—well, that’s pretty much his greatest fear right now.

He’s not about to say all that, but there’s one thing he can’t help zeroing in on.

“ _Found_ it comforting?” he prods. “Past tense.”

A moment’s silence. Then: _I find the memory comforting. If not the words._

Which makes Dean feel like kind of an asshole. But he isn’t about to kick off another sobfest, so he just says, “Yeah, damn right. Somebody oughta tell those angels that watching kids sleep is creepy.”

 _Remind me never to let you near another childhood memory_ , Cas says.

Dean’s halfway to an apology before he realizes, “You were joking! Dude, I’ve never heard you make a joke before.”

 _I’ll blame it on you_ , Cas tells him. But then his voice turns serious. _But Dean. If what you’ve told me is true—there is very little else that you deserve blame for. Whatever has happened—this situation wasn’t of your making._

Dean has about a hundred counterarguments to that. He’s so damn tired, though, and Christ knows he’s thought about them enough for one day. So all he says is, “Thanks, man.”

He doesn’t get any sleep that night. But as he lies there in the quiet and the dark, Cas’s words echo in his head, make him rest a little easier. He’s lost, and he’s tired, and he doesn’t know how to help Sam or the rest of the silo.

But he isn’t alone.


	9. Chapter 9

 

The last stretch of staircase to the up tops is painful. By the time they make it there, Dean is hobbling more than he’s climbing.

They stop off on Sixteen, and through the haze of pain and painkillers, it occurs to Dean to take a look at the drop-box while Jody and Garth fill up their water canteens. It doesn’t look like it’s been opened recently, and Jody’s calling him to head on up before he can start to ask around about whether anyone’s been seen near it.

They start up the stairs, and Dean’s bad knee wobbles under him, almost throwing him into a skinny blonde woman who’s hovering on the second-to-last step.

“Shit,” he says. “Sorry.”

She shrugs, shooting him a look somewhere between pity and amusement, and doesn’t say anything. Her eyes are sharp, though, taking in all three of them, their uniforms. She brushes past them and makes for the next flight down, her face set dead ahead, her walk purposeful. Dean could swear her eyes flicker towards the drop-box as she passes it, but she keeps walking, and all he can do is watch as she starts down the stairs.

His fucked-up knee ends up being a blessing in disguise, in one way at least. He isn’t exactly good for much, so for now, he’s off active duty and out of the spotlight—but without Ellen having to publicly backtrack on her decision to appoint him. In the office, he spends his time reading the Order and finishing up the listening station—which is done after a few days. At first, he thinks, yeah—maybe it’ll help them find the people behind the bombing. Only if they use low-tech stuff like drop-boxes, then they’re probably wise to that. Then it occurs to Dean what it might end up being used for if Ruby gets wise to the fact they have it, and he pulls out a handful of vital components, shakes his head and frowns and announces to the office that he can’t figure out why the damn thing isn’t working.

In every other way, of course, being laid up a pain in the ass. Dean has to sit around waiting while Jody and the others try to hunt down Brady’s connections, and they’re making slow progress.

They’re getting nowhere, and Dean’s sitting on intel that could change that. Even if it does cast suspicion on him, he’s gonna have to spill.

He takes Jody aside, one afternoon when it’s just the two of them in the office. Or, well, he beckons her over, because getting up and walking around is kind of a painful process at the moment.

“Jody,” he says. “Look, before you rip me a new one—I’m sorry, okay?”

She raises an eyebrow. “Sorry about what?”

He hands her the note. “Found this a couple weeks back. In a package of stolen goods. You probably saw the report—that shadow porter, the Chambers kid, told me about a drop-box down on Sixteen they were using to swap contraband. I took a look when we stopped there on our way up. And I think it might still be in use. That blonde chick I nearly KO’d? She looked at it. I swear she did.”

Jody doesn’t say anything right away, just stares at the note, and Dean can feel his throat getting dry with nervousness.

“You gotta understand,” he says. “People were already looking at me like I was some kind of criminal, Ruby had it in for me, Sam could've gotten in trouble—I was shit-scared.” He pauses. “Jody. Say something.”

She sighs. “I believe you,” she says. “The others would, too, if I told them. Which I’m not gonna. But you understand how this looks. If it got out—”

Dean drops his head. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I get it.”

Jody shakes her head, looks at him with sadness in her eyes. But when the others return, she sets up a watch on the drop-box down on Sixteen.

It doesn’t help them any. Nobody comes.

 

 

 

 

Dean learns from Jess that Brady used to be a shadow in IT. Started the same year she and Sam did, was gonna be a high-flyer by all accounts, but dropped out—family problems, drinking problem, some combination of the two; she isn't really sure—and hasn’t been in touch with any of his peers in over a year. She has no idea why he’d suddenly up and join some fanatical suicide-bomber faction.

They don’t hear anything from Sam.

Jess’s friend Charlie says she’s seen Ruby taking food and bundles of clothing into the server room a couple times, so they figure that she told the truth on that score, at least—Sam really is in there. But they don’t hear anything from him, and Dean starts to wonder, against his will, if there was something to all that crap Ruby came out with when they confronted her. If she really has managed to convert Sam to her point of view. Surely he’d have figured out a way to get a message to Dean or Jess by now, if he wanted to? Found a way out, if he was trapped? Sam’s smart. Ruby couldn’t have kept him hidden away right there in her section all this time if he wasn’t going along with it.

Maybe he’s found something out, and he’s sticking with her until he gets the full story. Dean keeps telling himself that. But the days ebb by with no messages and no clues, and it gets harder and harder to keep hoping.

His conversations with Cas tail off, too. He keeps switching on the radio, last thing at night, but nobody speaks. He doesn’t dare be the one to reach out, because what if somebody who isn’t Cas answers again? What if it’s somebody who’ll report Cas to the higher-ups in his silo?

And what if it turns out Cas doesn’t want to speak to him?

He might not have spilled all the details, the last time they spoke, but he did sniffle like a little kid. He didn’t think Cas was too weirded out by it, at the time. The guy even tried to help, in his own awkward way. Still, Dean wouldn’t blame him for deciding the whole thing is too much trouble and deciding to cut it off. Cas has problems of his own. No reason he should have to worry about Dean’s shit, too.

Dean finds himself sitting up in the cafeteria a lot, since he doesn’t have much work to do. Getting himself up the stairs on his injured knee is a pain in the ass, and unnecessary when he isn't working, but he does it anyway. Stays there for hours, some days.

He still sits with his back to the viewscreen. He doesn’t speak to anybody much, except for Jess and sometimes Garth. It ain’t too different from sitting on his ass back in his quarters.

If he had to explain why he does it, he’d say that it’s the closest thing he has to a _fuck you_. He may be off active duty, but that doesn’t mean he has to run away and hide.

Only, maybe it’s something different than that. Something way more pathetic.

He needs to get away from all the silence. The burble of conversation that surrounds him up here may not include him, the people sitting at each side of him may not know him—but at least he’s still in the world. At least he feels like he exists.

 

 

 

 

The crackle of the radio wakes him early one morning, before his alarm.

He’s gotten into the habit of leaving it on late into the night, hoping against hope to hear Cas’s voice through the static. He must’ve fallen asleep without switching it off.

 _Dean?_ comes through the radio. _Are you there?_

He scrambles out of bed, grinning absurdly. “Yeah. Yeah, Cas, I’m here.”

_You’re not working?_

“Not right now. Uh, I didn’t get fired or anything. Not yet, anyway. But some stuff happened. Plus I fucked up my knee, so, y’know. Not exactly much use to anybody right now.”

_You’re hurt? Dean, I’m sorry._

“Don’t worry about it, man. I can walk okay now. Hurts like a bitch is all.” Dean scrambles for a change of subject, because he doesn’t wanna have to rehash the bombing incident right now. Or ever, really. “So. Where you been, man?”

Cas sounds uncomfortable when he answers. _I was—taken off duty for a few days._

Dean raises his eyebrows. “You too, huh?” Then he frowns to himself, a spike of worry making itself felt in his gut. “Hey, this ain’t because of you talking to me, is it?”

 _No_ , Cas says. _Confessions are—routine. It was overdue, in fact._

He doesn’t exactly sound thrilled about it, though. Not that Dean can blame him. “Confessions?” he says. “Well, that sounds about as much fun as falling down a flight of stairs.”

 _It’s an exercise designed to strengthen loyalty_ , Cas tells him. _Infractions committed during the rest of the year are punished immediately, if found out. But Confession requires us to share all our sins with our brothers and sisters. Even those committed in thought alone._

_Our atonement is decided for us. Mostly they are minor—a few days’ prayer suffices. The point is for us to trust our brothers and sisters to treat us fairly, to absolve us of our human failings and accept us anew. Lying, even by omission, is a serious offense._

“Human failings?” Dean says. “So, like—talking to me, is that a human failing?”

_I believe it would be considered one, yes._

“You believe?” Dean looks at the radio. “You didn’t tell them,” he realizes.

_I wouldn’t be talking to you if I had._

“You probably shouldn’t be talking to me anyway,” Dean points out. “Anybody hears you—”

 _They won’t_ , Cas cuts in. _I’m being careful._ He pauses, then. Dean. _This is my decision. Not your responsibility. You don’t have to protect me from the consequences of my actions._

Dean swallows, at a loss for a reply. Sure, Cas is a grown-ass man, at least as far as Dean knows, and it’s up to him who he wants to talk to. But what he said about lying being a serious offense? Yeah, Dean got the impression that doesn’t mean a twenty-chit fine and a slap on the wrist, in Cas’s world. He doesn’t get why Cas would keep on doing it, risking everything, just to talk to him.

He’s trying to think of a way to say it that doesn’t make him sound like a clucking mother hen when Cas hisses, _Gabriel’s coming back; I have to go_ , and shuts off the radio.

Dean’s left sitting there in his underwear, looking at it, a weight in his chest.

Still, at least Cas is okay.

All Dean needs now is a message from Sam, and he’s—okay, not exactly golden. But a couple steps further from total despair.

 

 

 

 

He gets up early. Puts weight on his bad leg carefully, and finds that it holds up okay, the needles of pain that shoot up from his knee when he stands fainter than before.

Good. Maybe he’ll be able to talk Jody or Ellen into giving him something to do, even if it’s unofficial.

The staircase is busy with people heading up to the cafeteria as the breakfast rush kicks off. Dean’s gotten into the habit of sleeping later than usual during his couple weeks’ semi-absence, and it’s still a little too early for him to be hungry. He decides to head on over to the office and grab something to eat once the crowds clear out.

Ellen’s still at breakfast, the lights off in her office, so he goes direct to speak to Jody.

“Look,” she says to him. “Things are still pretty unsettled. I don’t think it’s wise for you to be back on the frontline again right now. Whoever was behind Brady’s suicide—they’ve latched onto your father as a figurehead for their cause, and if you give ‘em the opportunity, there’s a good chance they’ll latch onto you, too. Oppose them and you’ll be a target; don’t, and you risk people thinking you’re one of them.”

“Yeah. I get that.” Dean takes a gulp of bitter black coffee from the cup Rufus, unexpectedly, hands him. That’s one thing he’s gonna miss about being an invalid: sympathy from these guys is a rare commodity. “But I’m gonna go nuts if I gotta sit on my ass much longer. Maybe I could sit guard on that drop-box, see if anybody else shows up. I’ll even write reports if you want me to, it’d be better’n doing nothing.”

Jody looks at him. “I’ll think about it,” she says, after a second. Then she nods at a pile of unsorted scrap paper on the desk Dean still thinks of as _Dad’s_. “Messages,” she says. “Think there’s one for you in there.”

He picks up the pile, rifles through them, willing his heartbeat to stay even, his hopes not to raise their heads. If Sam had managed to get a message out, he would’ve been more careful than this; would’ve made sure it got put straight into Dean’s own hands.

More likely, it’s something from Mechanical confirming that Dean’s little idea has gone off okay, or asking what happened with the Brady incident. He looks out for Bobby’s chickenscratch, or Benny’s blocky, painstaking script, but can’t see either of them.

Dean works through the messages backwards, so it’s a couple minutes before he gets to the one on top of the pile and realises that’s the one with his name on it. He unfolds it, frowning.

It takes him a second to make sense of it. Mostly numbers, and the word _CAFETERIA_ printed below them.

He’s seen this handwriting before.

And the numbers—they’re a date. Today’s date, matter of fact. And a time: 9:00.

Dean looks up. “Jody. You got the time?”

She glances at her watch. “Eight forty-nine. If you’re thinking about breakfast, I’d give it a half hour. Still busy over there.”

“No.” He waves the note in front of her. “Jody. We gotta go.”

 

 

 

 

Jody’s right; the cafeteria is still crowded. The line at the counter snakes back toward the door, and the tables are crowded with people. People eating, people talking, people milling around to find their coworkers and friends.

No sign of anything untoward. Nobody so much as blinks at Dean, Jody, and Rufus standing in the doorway. A woman in navy barges past Dean with a frown, and he mutters, “Ow! Fuck,” as he puts his weight unexpectedly on his sore knee.

Jody turns a concerned look on him, and he opens his mouth to brush her off, tell her he’s fine.

That’s when, “Dean Winchester!” rings out across the cafeteria in a high, unfamiliar voice. It cuts through the hubbub like a hot knife, a hush rippling out from the source of the voice to encompass the whole room.

Eyes follow the sound, and the crowd parts around the speaker. Through the gap, Dean catches sight of Ellen on the other side of the cafeteria, flanked by a man and a woman from one of the lower Security stations, frozen in place with a coffee mug halfway to her mouth.

But his eyes are drawn back to the speaker as she begins to move towards him, the people in between shuffling back out of her way as though hypnotised. A blonde woman in a white coverall, her wide mouth fixed in a smile. Her movements are unhurried; confident. Dean feels his breath catch as he recognises her. She’s the woman from Sixteen.

She stops right in front of him. Blinks her eyes and says, “Don’t worry. I mean _you_ no harm,” and Dean realises that his hands are balled into fists, that Jody and Rufus are both poised as if to grab her by the scruff of her neck.

The woman rises onto her tiptoes, and places a kiss on Dean’s cheek. He’s startled enough that he doesn’t even flinch, just stares at her like a rat caught in the beam of a flashlight.

“I wanted to thank you,” she says, then. Her voice is clear as a bell. “For showing us the way.”

And she turns and makes a run for the other side of the cafeteria.

She’s heading straight for Ellen. Reaching inside of her coverall, and it’s oddly-fitting like Brady’s, Dean can see that now, and the world’s in slow motion and he feels like he’s trapped in a net, useless.

He darts forward and his knee goes out from under him. Opens his mouth and his voice is caught in his throat and all that comes out is a gasp of pain.

He hears Jody yelling something, somewhere above his head. She’s after the woman, and so is Rufus—but they aren’t fast enough—it’s too late—and then there’s a noise like the world collapsing and everything is smoke and chaos.

 

 

 

 

“I’m sorry, Rookie. I am.”

Rufus actually sounds like he means it.

Doesn’t change the fact that Dean’s locked in one of the cells beside the Sheriff’s office, waiting without much hope to find out his fate.

They’re not gonna have any choice. He gets that.

Ellen’s dead. Dean is yet to get his head around that. He was there, he saw the blast, he knows nobody could’ve survived it. But when he thinks about it, his head rings with the force of the explosion and he feels stunned by it all over again.

Still, she’s gone. So are a dozen other people. Tens more are injured, and the woman who did it named him as the ringleader in front of half the up tops. The moment Jody starts digging through his personal stuff, she’s gonna find a bunch of sedition scrawled in the margins of his copy of the Order—which is practically blasphemy—and with the note this morning on top? It’s not gonna matter that she still thinks he’s innocent. If she even does.

It’s a perfect set-up.

Dean drops his head into his hands in despair. “I had nothing to do with it,” he says, through his fingers. “You know that, right?”

Rufus just sighs. “I don’t know what I know anymore,” he says.

He locks the door to the cells behind him.

 

 

 

 

It’s a long day, and a longer night.

Straining to hear the voices of his coworkers—okay, former coworkers—in the office next door, trying to figure out what’s being said, what the fuck is going on out there, is bad enough. The silence is worse. Dean’s imagination turns every sound that echoes through the silo into the clang of the airlock door opening. Every footstep belongs to a smirking Ruby, come to watch him led out there to his death.

The imminent-death part isn’t the worst of it. It’s the thought that they’ve won. The fuckers have _won_. Dad’s dead, Ellen’s dead, Sammy’s locked up, the silo is falling apart—and for what? So IT can install some puppet Mayor, shut down anybody who might be thinking about asking questions, maintain the status quo? So the lie can carry on for another generation?

It’s such a waste—of life, of everything—and there’s nothing he can do. Dean’s head swirls, dizzies him with impotent rage. He’s on his feet without realising it, smashes his fist into the wall of his cell—once—twice—again—

“Knock it off in there!” comes a voice he doesn’t recognise. The door opens a crack, but the lights are off in the cell block, and Dean can’t see the face of the person looking in.

Like it matters. He subsides, sinks back onto the narrow cot, his flare of resentment fading away as quickly as it came.

There’s no point. No point fighting anymore. Even if Bobby and Benny have already come through with their end of the bargain, if their plan comes off, he’s never gonna get back into the silo. He’s just gonna die slow out there from dehydration, instead of quick from the corrosive air.

There’s no chance he’s gonna get to the truth and spread it around. There’s just defeat, and the thick quiet of the up tops pressing in around him.

It’s about the time he’d speak to Cas, normally, he figures. He feels another pang of sadness at that, at the thought that Cas won’t ever know why Dean’s gone radio silent. Either he’ll figure Dean is some ungrateful dumbfuck who’s given up on him even after he put his ass on the line, or he’ll worry for a while and eventually forget about Dean, go back to his life of plodding obedience.

Weirdly, Dean finds himself worrying as much about that as about what Sam’s gonna think. Though, maybe it isn’t so weird. However deep Ruby has her claws into him, Dean can’t convince himself that Sam would believe he’s responsible for this.

Dean might’ve fucked up, but at least he fucked up trying to do the right thing. Sam will know that. He has to.

It’s the last thing Dean has to hold onto, and he tries to keep his mind on it through the small hours of the night, to keep away the silence.

 

 

 

 

“You got a visitor,” are the words that wake Dean the next morning.

He hasn’t exactly slept easy, dozing through nightmare images, nursing his bloodied knuckles on the narrow cot. When he closes his eyes, he sees Dad standing in the airlock, mouthing _I’m going to be fine_ at Dean over Henriksen’s shoulder.

Dean watches Dad’s face through the helmet of his cleaning suit. _I’m going to be fine_ , he says, and he keeps on saying it as his suit splits apart at the seams, as his face takes on a greyish tinge, as the flesh sloughs off of his skull and his body crumples to the ground.

The dream changes, then.

The silo is full of water and Dean is sinking in it, down into darkness and silence. His mouth works and no sound comes out. He sees Sam, far above him, reaching a hand down into the depths—but then Ruby looms up beside him. She takes him by surprise, grabs his hair and shoves his head underwater, and Dean watches him drown, his mouth working in betrayed surprise.

It’s the last image that stays with him as he wakes, that leaves him gasping and disoriented, feeling like he’s the one with a lungful of water.

He blinks and the scene resolves itself into reality. He’s still in the cells, Rufus standing in the doorway. He steps aside to let the ‘visitor’ through.

It’s Jess. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her hair dishevelled. She doesn’t look like she’s slept.

Dean only has one question, though: “Sam? Does he know?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. Her mouth sets. “But I do know he won’t blame you. I don’t.”

He manages a small smile. “Thanks.”

“I went to your quarters,” Jess goes on. “When I heard. Before Jody and the guys could get down there.”

Dean looks at her in surprise. “How’d you get in?”

“Sam taught me a couple things. Before we snuck into the workshop. Anyway, there wasn’t much in there to get rid of. But I found this.” Jess turns her back on him, fishing down the front of her coverall. When she faces him again, she’s holding something out in her hand.

It’s the radio.

“How’d you get that in here?” Dean asks, surprised.

“Honestly? I didn’t think I was gonna manage it.” She flicks a glance towards the door. “Lucky the old guy was on guard duty, I guess.”

Honestly, Dean can’t see Rufus being the kind to let a visitor sneak something into the cells out of embarrassment. If he didn’t check too closely—that was a deliberate choice. Isn’t worth much, in terms of saving Dean’s sorry ass, but he holds onto it anyway.

He takes the radio with a grateful nod, and tucks it inside the top half of his coverall.

“I found one other thing,” Jess goes on. “There was a note under your door. Don’t know how long it had been there.”

Not long; if Jess got down there before Jody or any of the others did, Dean couldn’t have been out of his quarters for more than an hour. He frowns, but feels a faint pang of hope. “Who from?” he asks.

Jess shakes her head. “Wasn’t signed. Whoever wrote it, they had seriously shitty handwriting. It said, ‘All done. You’re’ and I couldn’t make out the rest of it.”

“‘You’re an idiot’?” Dean guesses.

“You know, that might’ve been it,” Jess says, and Dean feels his mouth twitch in an involuntary smile.

It doesn’t make a difference. He already knows that. But Bobby and Benny—at least they knew. They knew what he was afraid of. They knew IT was out to get him, and they tried to help. That was something, right?

Dean realises he’s thinking about himself in the past tense. Like he’s already a dead man.

Which is about right. This is all he has to hold on to, now—the knowledge that the people he knows, the ones who are _family_ , don’t believe he’s some murderous nutjob, even if the rest of the silo does.

It’s much later, when Jess is gone and Dean is alone in his cell again, that he pulls out the radio and looks at it, and realises he was including Cas in that number.

 

 

 

 

He doesn’t turn the radio on that night, or the next. It’s dumb, holding onto it instead of using it, but if anybody caught him with it, they’d take it from him—never mind that even if Dean really did have a network of extremists taking orders from him somewhere in the silo, there’s nowhere here for him to escape _to_.

Having it here, though—it’s the closest thing he has to the presence of a friend.

Jess doesn’t show up again, and Dean figures out from the guilty look that crosses Garth’s face when he asks about it that he isn’t being allowed any more visitors. He doesn’t ask why; but he figures it out when Ruby shows up in the cell block on the afternoon of his third day there, accompanied by a stern-faced guy who Dean can’t put a name to, and an unhappy-looking Jody.

The new guy steps forward, and Dean realises he’s wearing a Sheriff’s— _Dad’s_ —badge. He must be the guy Ellen talked about, when she first asked Dean to take the job. Walker. The hardliner who Ruby wanted to install as Deputy. Now he’s been promoted to Sheriff, over and above Jody?

That can only mean one thing. Without a Mayor to keep order, IT is running the silo. No wonder Dean hasn’t been allowed to see anybody.

“ _Former_ Deputy Winchester,” Walker says, hard eyes fastening on Dean’s face, “You’ve committed sedition. You’ll be sent to cleaning. Tomorrow morning, at dawn.”

 _You’ve committed sedition_. Not _you’ve been found guilty of sedition._

Not that they have judges and juries, the way the Ancients did. The silo doesn’t have the infrastructure for that kind of procedure. Occupations have to pay their way, day to day, and a complicated legal system couldn’t do that. But the Mayor has to approve something as drastic as a cleaning.

Doesn’t really matter, he guesses. Whether Ruby’s shoved another of her puppets into Ellen’s office, or she’s ditched the pretense and started running the show herself, Dean’s still fucked.

“I knew your father,” Walker says, then. “Damn waste. Sorry to see his son go the same way.”

It’s quiet, like it should be a personal thing, but there’s no compassion in the severe lines of his face.

Dean turns his back on them and doesn’t reply.

 

 

 

 

That night, he turns on the radio. He figures, why not? What are they gonna do to him if they catch him?

As it turns out, he gets a chance he wasn’t expecting. He can’t hear much at normal conversation volume, through the door that separates the cells from the Sheriff’s office, but a couple hours after lights out, he hears shouting.

It’s Walker’s voice. Dean can’t make out all of what he says, just a couple phrases. _Call on the radio_ , and, _Twenty-Two_ , and, _Move out, now!_ He hears footsteps, the door to the office slamming shut, and then there’s silence. Sounds like they’ve all headed out.

Dean’s stomach twists, at the thought of what might’ve gotten Walker to leave him unguarded like this. Not that he has any way of getting out, but the guy doesn’t strike him as one to take chances. The thought of more lives being wasted in Dad’s name makes him feel sick, puts him on alert, and he sits there for a long while, listening out for the explosion.

It doesn’t come. And after a while, the silence threatens to drive him crazy, and he pulls out the radio and turns it on.

He hasn’t spoken to anyone since Ruby and Walker came in to pronounce sentence on him. Hasn’t spoken much, over the last couple days.

So when Cas’s _Hello, Dean_ crackles over the airwaves, he opens his mouth to reply and finds that no sound comes out.

He swallows and tries again. “Hey, Cas,” he says, and the words scrape out of his throat like he’s sick.

 _I was worried_ , Cas tells him. His voice is rough. The solemnity of it would make Dean laugh, under other circumstances, but now it aches in him, makes him feel like all of his insides are bruised.

“Yeah, well,” he says. “Just calling to say goodbye.”

_Dean—_

The appalled silence into which Cas tails off says it all, really. If Dean could just leave it at that, he would.

He owes Cas something, though. If it was the other way around, he’d want to know.

“Yeah,” he says. There’s a hopeless smile on his face—he can feel it, and even though Cas isn’t looking at him, even though he’s got nobody to look like he’s okay for, it won’t go away. He wonders if this is how hysteria starts; if they’ll come to take him out in the morning and find him laughing like a maniac. “Tomorrow. I—I got set up, Cas. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything.” He deflates, then. Stares at the bright stripe of light creeping under the cellblock door, the long shadows of the bars as they fall towards him. “Doesn’t matter, I guess. They’re sending me to cleaning.”

He ought to say something else. Like, _Thanks for being there_ , or, _I’m sorry_ , or who knows what else. Something.

But before he can do it, Cas’s voice, low and urgent, cuts through the static.

 _Do you know where North-West is?_ he says.

It’s enough to startle Dean out of his thoughts. “Huh?”

_North-West. Do you know where it is?_

Dean’s brain takes a second to lock onto the right track, the question is so unexpected. But then he remembers Sam’s drawings of the stars; the little compass design in the corner of it.

North: that was where the really bright star rose. _Pole Star_ , Sam had called it. Over the place where Mom fell.

Mom.

Maybe Dean will just go join her, tomorrow. Find the place where her body rests and curl up beside it; lay himself down to sleep and let the wind take his bones for dust.

He forces his thoughts back to the matter at hand. That’s North. So if he remembers Sam’s drawing right, North-West is a little to the left.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I think so.”

 _Good_ , Cas says. _Do something for me. Tomorrow. Walk in that direction._

“What?” Dean asks, confusion momentarily derailing all his other concerns. “Why?”

 _Just do this_ , Cas says to him, and it’s a plea, his voice raw as a torn-off scab. _Please_.

Dean opens his mouth to say okay, sure, nothing to lose, when a call of “Winchester!” comes from the cellblock door. He kills the radio and shoves it behind him as the door cracks open, a line of light slicing toward him across the floor.

Walker’s face appears in the gap. “The hell you doing, talking to yourself?” he says.

Dean aims a sneer at him through the bars. “Yeah. ‘S what crazy people do, right?”

Walker snorts and slams the door. Dean catches just a snatch of conversation through it before it shuts. “False alarm,” Jody’s worried voice says. “Still, it makes you wonder—”

He never hears the end of her sentence, but he gets to wondering himself. Bobby has access to radio comms. A warning about a bombing in the up tops would be enough to get all security personnel called in—even those guarding the airlock, where the cleaning suit’s kept, ready for tomorrow. If their plan really came off and they needed to switch it out—well, that’d be one way of doing it.

It’s no guarantee. But he wonders.

 

 

 

 

Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t sleep.

Morning—signalled by the abrupt flickering-on of the overhead lights, sickly fluorescence filling the cellblock and showing up the sleepless circles under every set of eyes—finds him sitting on the bunk with his hands clasped in front of him. The scabs on his knuckles stand out in sharp relief. Dean notices, absently, that they itch.

The radio is tucked into the waistband of his coverall, digging into the small of his back. It shifts, uncomfortable, as he stands; the touch like a reassurance, like the _goodbye_ or _it’s okay_ that Cas didn’t say back to him.

Nobody says much to him right now, either. Walker gives the instructions; the two guys waiting in the airlock with the cleaning suit and the brushes and the disinfectant are faces Dean doesn’t recognise.

He scans the crowd as he’s led through the cafeteria in handcuffs, thinking to look for Jess or Jo or Benny, anybody that might meet his eyes and see him and maybe mouth a goodbye across the room.

But it’s all over too fast, the light from the airlock smearing the assembled faces into a featureless blur, and then he’s standing inside it and there’s only a single door between him and the _outside_.

He doesn’t really register the instructions, as one of the guys points out the different pockets on the cleaning suit, which cloth is to be used first on the camera lens. He just nods, numbly. It occurs to him that he should look over the cleaning suit—check for clues that the plan really did come off, that this one’s made with real heat tape and isn’t gonna disintegrate—but by the time his brain has made sense of the thought, it’s too late. His wrists are uncuffed and his arms are being pulled out from his sides, the cocoon of the cleaning suit zipped up around him and the helmet placed over his head.

“Pull down the visor before you go outside,” warns one of the guys, and then they’re stepping back into the cafeteria, ducking under the closing door.

The airlock door opens. White plumes of disinfectant puff out from the dispensers, obscuring the ramp up for a moment.

Dean steps forward like a man in a dream. Clicks the visor into place.

And then he walks out into paradise.

 

 

 

 

He’s never seen so much colour.

The grass beneath his feet and the warm red of the earth, and there are so many kinds of green out here. It’s nothing like the mids—all that life and lushness is multiplied by a dozen, by a hundred, out here. White flowers peek out from the grass beneath his feet, and trees the height of a level stand on top of the bank, their leaves rustling in the gentle breeze, their shadows falling softly onto the ground.

Dean sees a bird break the canopy of leaves and dart off into the sky, wings whirring, and he stares. He can’t help it. A couple white clouds stretch membrane-thin across the sky, but it’s so blue, so vivid, realer than anything in the silo, than anything he’s ever seen.

And it’s a lie. He knows it’s a lie.

He stops still where he stands. Turns back towards the silo.

The doors are closed, and the entrance nestles in a bank of bright grass. The camera screen peers out from beneath an outcrop of rock whose surface shimmers with tiny crystals in the sunlight.

Dean turns away from it. He feels dizzy with the unexpected beauty of it; finally gets why Sam and Jess couldn’t find the words for what they saw. It disorients him for a moment and he turns and turns, can’t figure out where the spot he’s supposed to navigate by is.

Then his boot hits a rock, and it gives where it shouldn’t.

There are maybe a dozen of them, big ones, scattered across the grass seemingly at random. When he looks down, the surface is undamaged; but he knows he felt it move, soft beneath his foot.

And he realises, with a sick feeling, what they are.

He finds his way. Up the bank, North—no, North-West. Gets as far as he expected—further—as far as Dad did, and his knee protests and he’s getting tired, his head pounding, but he’s still going, the cleaning suit holds.

He reaches the top of the bank.

And the image on his visor dissolves into pixels as it encounters something it’s not designed to cope with. The jewel colours of the paradise around him spiral into nothingness like ashes, whipped away by the punishing wind.

Only wasteland remains. Colourless and rubble-strewn, lumps in the dusty ground whose outlines give away their origins all too clearly, and which Dean doesn’t pause to look at. There’s another bank, dipping down into a hollow in the grey earth, like the one he came from.

At the centre of it, a ramp leads down to a doorway. The doorway to another silo. And the outer airlock door is _open_.

Dean stumbles to a halt and stares.

He squints towards it. Takes a step down the bank, another, lands hard on his injured knee and slips on loose earth and stone. He gasps for air and his lungs hurt. The cleaning suit isn’t gonna hold much longer.

The realisation spurs him into action, and he makes for the door as fast as he can, stumbling every couple steps as pain knifes up through his injured leg. The uneven ground gives beneath his feet and he falls forward, jarring his wrists as he takes his weight on his palms, saves himself from going down face-first and breaking open the visor of his helmet.

Dean pushes himself up and keeps going. Down the ramp, towards the yawning airlock door. He slips, lands on his knee half-inside the airlock and can’t get up. Claws with his hands and finds bare flooring, shoves forward in a crawl on his elbows. Catches his injured knee against the outside doorframe and curls in on himself, gasping for breath.

The judder of the inner door opening doesn’t even register. Until somebody ducks through it and there’s a hand on his shoulder, finding purchase in the fabric of his cleaning suit and hauling him into the airlock.

The outer door comes back down with a hiss, and Dean is on his back on the floor, blinking up into the bluest eyes he’s ever seen.


	10. Chapter 10

 

He’s dying. That has to be it.

He’s still lying out there in the dust and the rubble, and this is the last hallucination of an oxygen-starved brain. He just can’t figure out why his brain would invent a total stranger to stand over him in his dying moments, and not Mom or Dad or Sam.

Or why the stranger would be shaking his shoulder, brows furrowed in concern, or saying, “Dean. Stay with me. _Dean_.”

Dean’s head is spinning, his brain isn’t connected to his other senses right, and it takes him a minute to connect the dots, to match up the words he’s hearing to the fact that the stranger’s lips are moving, to the concern in those pretty blue eyes.

The stranger knows his name. And Dean knows the stranger’s voice.

He knows it as a whisper over the airwaves; a ghost in the machine. In person, its low resonance is startling, rough as rusted metal but warm and living. Like he could reach out and touch it.

His mind wraps around the sound and holds on tight. It’s real. This is real.

He’s alive. His chest hurts and his leg hurts—actually, he hurts all over—but he’s alive. He blinks his stinging eyes and takes in a lungful of air, shuddering. Curls up slowly into a sitting position.

“Dean,” the voice says again, and he realises he’s holding onto the stranger’s arm. Cas’s arm.

He steadies himself with a hand on the floor, and meets Cas’s eyes again. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, Cas, I’m good.”

The furrows between Cas’s eyebrows deepens. “I find that hard to believe.”

And Dean, dizzy with pain and relief and the total fucking absurdity of the whole thing, actually laughs. It comes out more of a gasp than anything, short and painful, but he laughs.

“Okay,” he gets out. “I’m alive. So I’m better’n I expected when I woke up this morning. That do?”

The worried set of Cas’s mouth softens. “Yes,” he says. The earnestness of it makes Dean want to laugh again. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

“Me too,” Dean tells him, and he thinks he means it. “Me too.”

Cas opens his mouth as if to say something else, but he stops short; tilts his head, listening. The frown is back. “Stay down,” he hisses, and then he’s on his feet, ducking out under the inner airlock door.

It closes with the same shuddering sound the one back home did, and Dean can’t help but feel a twinge of discomfort at the noise. Which is probably dumb, because Cas didn’t let him in here just to send him right back out again, but just in case, he stuffs himself into the right-hand corner nearest the wall, holding the helmet of the cleaning suit in both hands. It’s heavy enough that he might just be able to knock somebody out with it.

There are voices out in the canteen—or the room that should be the canteen, if this silo’s laid out the same way as back home. Cas’s voice, and that of a woman. They’re distorted through the inner door, and strain as he might, he can’t hear what’s being said.

It’s only a couple minutes, probably, before the voices go quiet and the door opens, but it feels like it’s been forever. Cas ducks back into the airlock, casting a panicked look around the small space before his eyes land on Dean where he’s huddled into the corner.

“I’m sorry for the interruption,” Cas tells him. “My sister Anna was sent to find me. I told her the control panels on Ten indicated a problem with the doors and I came up to check it out. I think she believed me.” He kneels as he talks, moves to take the heavy helmet from Dean’s hands.

Dean blinks at him, first in surprise at the simple gesture, then in relief at the realisation that yeah, for now—he really is safe. He exhales like a weight’s been lifted from his chest, actually feeling the cool air on his face, the way his skin is damp with sweat from sweltering inside the damn suit. Even the throb of pain in his bad knee and the way his hands shake as his adrenaline levels subside aren’t a hundred percent unwelcome. It’s all proof that he’s alive.

He actually closes his eyes briefly, takes a couple seconds to just breathe. “Anna,” he says, when he feels a little steadier. “She’s the sister with the shitty lullabies, right?”

Cas gives him a small smile. “Yes.” His face turns serious, then. “I have to go. Stay up here until I come back for you. You should be safe; this level isn’t in use. Don’t make any noise. Don’t try to turn on the lights. If you hear anybody coming, there’s a small storeroom over to the left. You can hide in there.”

“Okay.” Dean scrubs at his face. “When you gonna be back?”

“Soon,” Cas promises. He reaches to pick something off the floor by his feet, holds it out to Dean. It’s a water canteen. “Here,” he says. “Drink. Don’t go anywhere.” And then he’s gone.

 

 

 

 

The emergency lighting up here is faint, and Dean’s eyes take a while to acclimatise to it. From what he can make out, the layout is the same as that in the cafeteria back home.

No: not _home_. Back in the silo he came from. He figures he’d better get used to thinking of it like that.

The viewscreen is the one thing that’s visibly different. Cas said they didn’t use this level, which Dean figures means they don’t set much store by looking at the outside world—but the screen actually looks like it’s been covered over. The emergency lighting catches on a gleam of something dully metallic, which makes Dean think there might be some kind of design painted over it, but it’s too dim here for him to make out what.

He ducks out under the inner door and hobbles his way across the cafeteria, catching his breath when his injured leg knocks the back of a chair and sets it wobbling with a rattling sound that seems loud enough to reverberate through the whole silo.

Dean catches his breath and holds it for an excruciating moment, but nobody comes.

He pulls out a chair and sinks into it, sipping at the water canteen Cas gave him and just about resisting the urge to chug it all down so fast he pukes.

The water and the stillness help him settle. Try as he might, though, Dean still can’t wrap his head around the whole situation. He never actually tried to picture the other silos, but he sure as hell didn’t realise they were right here. That Cas has been a couple hundred meters away from him this whole time. And he can’t figure out why Cas would put everything on the line like this just to save him. Leave his post and lie to his sister and risk—well, whatever they’d do to him in here for something like this.

Anna’s the sister who comforted him as a little kid. The way he talked about her, it’s like they really _were_ family, and now he’s lying to her. That’s gotta be tough.

Dean marshals his thoughts off of that track, though, because he knows where it’s gonna lead.

He started the day thinking that he was never gonna see Sam again, and that still looks like it’s true—but he’s still alive and now the absence of Sam in his life is real and huge and gaping, a thing he has to live with. It’s the thing in which all the other absences echo—Dean’s home, his friends, the world he belongs to. So much loss the thought of it is like vertigo, and if he faces it it’s gonna suck all of the air out of his lungs and he’ll collapse from the inside out.

So he makes himself think about the smaller things.

Where is Cas gonna take him, when he comes back? What’s he gonna do here? How’s he gonna keep out the way of Cas’s ‘family’? Is he gonna have to hide forever?

If it was up to him, he’d get out of here and look for answers—maybe explore, find out the lay of the silo. If he wasn’t limping, maybe he’d do that anyway.

He isn’t gonna be up to much sneaking around with his fucked-up knee, though, and getting caught and locked in a cell again sounds even less like fun than sitting here wondering. So he waits.

 

 

 

 

It’s hard to keep track of time without any lighting. Dean doesn’t have a watch, and he can’t look out through the viewscreen, so the hours and the minutes blur together. He finds himself yawning, has to pinch himself hard to stop himself from drifting off and make himself keep listening out for footsteps on the stairs. His sleeping patterns have been screwed up for weeks, though, so that doesn’t tell him anything.

He’s always thought it was pointless, the way the lighting on the staircase and in the communal areas of his silo mimicked the passing of days and nights outside, the canteen darkening along with the sky in the viewscreen. Now, though, he finds himself missing it. He wonders if Sam would have ever even have noticed the stars, ever started drawing his maps of them, if the lights stayed on all night.

Sometime in what he guesses to be the afternoon, Dean figures his eyes aren’t gonna stay open much longer, so he opens the storage closet Cas pointed him to and wedges himself inside the bottom of it, out of sight. It’s just about large enough that he doesn’t have to bend his injured knee at an awkward angle, but it isn’t what he’d call comfortable.

By the time Cas gets back, Dean’s half asleep. He blinks gritty eyes when the sound of footsteps on the cafeteria floor pierces his consciousness, holds his breath until he hears Cas’s voice call his name.

“In here,” he says, and it comes out in a cracked whisper. He finished the water in the canteen hours ago, and his throat feels papery and sore. He swallows, tries again: “Cas. I’m in here.” He pushes at the door with his foot.

It opens from the outside, and Cas leans into the small space, offering his hand to help Dean to his feet. When he ducks out into the cafeteria, he sees that Cas is smiling.

They’re standing eye-to-eye—for the first time, now that Dean thinks about it. Cas is actually a couple inches shorter than him, which Dean’s brain takes a couple seconds to wrap itself around—he guesses because Cas spent the whole of their conversation this morning looming over him. His eyes are just as piercing as Dean’s first impression suggested, though. Their sharp focus is a little unnerving, truth be told; makes him feel like he’s being inspected.

Dean reminds himself that he’s the first person outside of his ‘family’ that Cas has ever seen. He tries not to take the scrutiny too personally.

Cas is still smiling at him, after all. It’s a nice smile, actually—small but genuine, lighting him up like flicking a switch. Something about Cas gives the impression he doesn’t smile a whole lot. It feels weird in a much better way, being the cause of it.

He’s kind of dishevelled, with his dark hair standing up like he just got out of bed and ran his hands through it, his beige overall rumpled, shadows under his eyes. Doesn’t look bad on him, though; more like it’s just who he is. Dean’s pretty sure _he_ just looks like shit. He’s unshaven and beat and starving and he probably smells more than a little ripe. Hopefully Cas’s plans for him involve a shower and something to eat at some point in the not-too-distant future, because otherwise his brothers and sisters are just gonna have to follow their noses or the growling of Dean’s stomach to find out their brother’s hiding a pet fugitive up here.

“I’m sorry I took so long,” Cas tells him. “I couldn’t get away from my station.” He ducks his head, all that unwavering focus suddenly dissolving. “I was starting to wonder if I’d imagined you.”

Well, Dean knows how that feels. Instead of admitting it, he cracks a smile. “Yeah, well,” he says. “I’m a wet dream come true.”

Cas crinkles his brow, humor detector apparently broken. Which, okay, Dean can understand that. Doesn’t seem like off-colour jokes are the order of the day around here.

“Never mind,” Dean says. “Bad joke. C’mon, what now?”

“My brothers and sisters will be at evening service right now. They believe I’m unwell.” Cas jerks his head towards the exit that, if the layout stays the same as in Dean’s silo, leads to the stairs. “With me. Keep quiet. There’s no reason anybody should need to come up past Ten after service, but we should still be cautious.”

Dean follows him, wondering vaguely what _evening service_ is, but soon finds himself lagging behind, his injured knee sending pain shooting up his thigh with every step. He doesn’t call out, but Cas turns his head before he reaches the door as if to say something else and stops dead when he realises Dean isn’t right behind him.

“You’re hurt,” he says, concern in his shadowed eyes.

“Fucked my knee pretty good on the way over here.” It feels weird, referring to the journey so casually, like he’s just talking about running down a couple levels to grab a cup of coffee or chat with a friend.

Cas tilts his head to look at Dean with assessing eyes. He shifts uncomfortably under the scrutiny. Okay, Cas is probably just trying to figure out how far he can get down the stairs on his damaged knee, but Dean can’t help wondering what Cas sees, looking at him.

Whether it’s something that was worth the risk, worth saving.

Finally, Cas nods. “I had planned to take you to one of the disused supply levels,” he says. “But we won’t make it that far tonight.”

“Shit. Sorry.”

Cas just turns and makes for the stairs again, but he slows his pace, and when they reach the top of the stairs, he stops and wordlessly holds out his arm.

“You don’t gotta do that, man,” Dean protests. It’s mostly a reflex, because getting down the stairs unaided would be a pain in the ass even if he didn’t have to worry about being heard on the way down.

Cas rolls his eyes. “It’s expedient,” he says, and grasps Dean’s arm, ducking his head under it so Dean can hold himself up between Cas and the stair rail.

“ _Expedient_? Who talks like that?” Dean grumbles. Cas looks at him sideways, the puzzled expression on his face entirely, startlingly genuine.

“I do?” Cas says, like he isn’t sure that’s the right answer. They’re at slightly-too-close quarters, and having those so-serious eyes look right into him makes Dean glance away again a fraction of a second too quick, flushing and suddenly grateful for the darkness. It’s uncomfortable.

Or, okay, not exactly uncomfortable. But it isn’t like Dean has the time or the brainpower to think about that kind of thing right now, so he just mutters, “Forget it,” and leans his weight on Cas’s shoulders as they climb down.

It’s spooky how quiet the place is. From what Cas said, there are way fewer people in his ‘family’ than a silo can support—but still, the echoing of all this space, reaching down into shadow, into the depths of the earth—feels huge and present in a way Dean’s rarely noticed before.

All that absence. He imagines he could hear a pin drop in the down deeps. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to look down the center of the staircase.

He turns back to Cas instead, fighting through his awkwardness. “So,” he says, keeping his voice low. “Where are we going? And please tell me it has food.”

“It doesn’t have food.” Cas frowns. “I brought some with me. I apologise—I should’ve offered it to you before now.”

Dean dismisses his apology with a shake of his head. “It’s cool,” he says. “Hey, you’re managing this whole unexpected crisis thing way better than I would.”

He can’t really place the look Cas turns on him in response to that.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Cas says, quietly. Then he directs his attention back to where they’re going—just in time, because that’s when Dean misjudges a step and stumbles, wincing as his injured leg takes most of his weight. Cas holds onto him while he rights himself.

“We’re going to the medical bay on Five,” Cas tells him, once he’s regained his balance. “You’ll stay there tonight.”

Dean raises an eyebrow. “Just gotta hope nobody gets sick in the night, that it?”

“Yes.” Cas doesn’t turn his head to look at Dean, this time, but his eyes flicker sideways. “The main medical center is down on Fifteen. There are too few of us for all of them to be kept open. This one has basic supplies, but it’s only used in emergencies.”

Dean nods. Honestly, once he has a bed to lay down in and a bottle of painkillers to guzzle, he can’t see himself being able to get up and run even if the whole silo were after him.

He’s so damn tired.

 

 

 

 

“You’ll need to—take your clothes off.”

Dean’s propped up on the bunk furthest from the entrance to the medical bay, head back, eyes closed. He feels a little closer to human after another canteen of water, a couple protein bars, and a dose of painkillers that would have Doctor Tran ripping him a new one, but his head and his knee are still sore, and opening his eyes seems to take as much effort as climbing fifty levels.

The medbay’s fuzzy, and Dean blinks a couple times before the scene resolves itself, Cas’s awkward expression coming into focus before his eyes.

“So I can bandage your knee,” Cas goes on, apologetically.

Dean shrugs, shoves himself to his feet using the support at the back of the bed and manages to hold himself upright, even if he does wobble a little. “Sure. Here, help me off with this.”

Cas blinks at him for a moment before he moves to help Dean shed the cleaning suit, the empty white husk of it falling softly to the floor. It’s dumb, but getting rid of it makes Dean feel like he can breathe easier.

He gets his overall off without help, while Cas bundles up the discarded cleaning suit with gloved hands and shoves it into a refuse bag. The radio was still tucked into the waistband of his uniform when he left, and now, he takes it out and sets it down carefully on the nightstand. The antenna’s broken off, and the casing is cracked; definitely not in working condition right now. Still, somehow, Dean’s glad he has it.

When Cas turns back and finds Dean sitting on the bed in his underwear, there’s a nanosecond where he just _stares_ , a faint blush staining his cheeks under the medbay lights.

It’s gone as quickly as it came, and then Cas is all business, reaching for bandages and strapping Dean’s knee up with sure, steady hands.

Dean reminds himself that it doesn’t mean anything. Cas’s silo is like some batshit religious commune. Seeing people in their underwear is probably reserved for medical professionals and newlyweds or something. Still, he catches his breath when Cas’s fingers brush his bare skin, and the pain in his leg is only half of it.

Cas looks up at him, all wide-eyed concern, his embarrassment apparently forgotten now that he’s absorbed in his task. “Did I hurt you?”

“Nah.” Dean shakes his head. “I’m fine.”

Cas’s eyes stay on him, unhappy. “You don’t need to lie to me, Dean. It won’t help me to help you.”

“Okay.” Dean sighs. “I’m not exactly gonna be dancing for joy anytime soon. But—thanks, Cas. Everything you’ve done for me, I don’t even know where to start, but thanks. I mean it.”

Cas smiles faintly at him, and turns back to the bandage.

 

 

 

 

Cas doesn’t stick around once he’s finished fixing up Dean’s knee. He refills the water canteen and pulls a couple more protein bars out of a pocket somewhere in his overall.

“This is all I have right now,” he says, apologetic. “I’ll be back in the morning, after my shift.”

Dean shrugs. Not exactly a breakfast to leap out of bed for, but his growling stomach takes precedence over his tastebuds for now. Plus, he has a bed to sleep in, clean air to breathe, painkillers to ease the throb of his injured knee—hell yeah, he’s grateful.

It’s when Cas leaves, turning out the lights and closing the door carefully behind him, and silence falls in the medbay, that Dean stops being able to focus on the practical details. He’s been counting his blessings instead of thinking about the great big looming fact that he’s exiled from his own world, but he can’t keep looking on the bright side forever.

His own silo might as well be a thousand miles away for all the chance he has of getting back there. Ellen’s gone. Sammy’s still locked away in that room in IT, maybe doesn’t even know what’s happened to his brother. And Dean would put money on Ruby having it out for their other friends—doing whatever she can to get Jody and Jess out the way, plus anybody else who looks like putting a spanner in the works of her plans. She’s bound to get suspicious, with Dean having gotten out of sight of the viewscreen camera without falling down. If she finds out Bobby and Benny had anything to do with helping him, they’re toast, too.

He’d thought the silence of the up tops back home was oppressive, but here—there’s so much of it. The place feels empty, for all that there’s a whole colony of religious nutjobs living their lives a couple levels below him; huge and strange.

He closes his eyes, presses his palm to the medbay wall. Back in his own quarters in Mechanical, Dean would’ve had the endless noise of the generator to lull him to sleep. Footsteps in the corridor, someone snoring loudly down the hall, the muffled noises of sex or conversation from the rooms on either side.

Right now, all he can hear is his own breathing. He really has never been so alone.


	11. Chapter 11

 

“Can you get some stuff for me?” is the first thing Dean says when Cas shows up again early in the morning, after his shift. He indicates the broken radio with a jerk of his head.

Cas peers around the curtain that sections off Dean’s bed from the rest of the medbay. It isn’t much protection, but hey—anything to buy a couple seconds’ reprieve from prying eyes, right? Cas ducks in around it, rubbing his eyes and then running his fingers through his hair, which does absolutely nothing to make him look less dishevelled. Or less confused.

“I brought food, if that’s what you mean,” he says, and begins to fumble with the small pack strapped across his body.

The hollows under his eyes are carved deeper than they were yesterday, and Dean remembers, abruptly, that he’s just worked a nightshift and he’s probably even tireder than Dean is. After everything he did for Dean yesterday, springing a demand on him first thing is kind of a dick move.

“I, uh—it was something else,” Dean says, mentally giving himself a smack on the back of the head. “But, listen, don’t worry. It can wait.”

Cas nods and comes up from his fumbling with another handful of protein bars, plus something unidentifiable sandwiched between two pieces of rubbery bread—and, oh sweet fucking Christ, an apple.

It’d be a luxury back home, where they have a fully-functioning farm section in the mids. Here—well, Dean can’t imagine how Cas got away with swiping it for him.

It’s an unnecessary risk, and part of him wants to be mad about it. The thought of Cas going to this kind of trouble for him, on top of everything he’s already done, makes him feel uneasy: a twinge of worry somewhere deep in his gut; a flutter of guilt. But at the same time—he finds himself weighing it in his hand, looking at it, like it’s more than just food.

“I don’t think nutritional value is absorbed too easily through the eyes,” Cas says.

Dean looks up at him. “Did you just make a joke?”

“No.” Cas’s poker face is fucking impeccable, Dean has to give him that.

He smirks. “What is that? Like, the second in a month?”

The corners of Cas’s eyes crease up in a way that gives the lie to his scowl. “Eat your food.”

Dean does as he’s told, while Cas checks the bandage on his knee and then produces a spare set of clothes out of the pack. Dean doesn’t how much time they have. Not enough to waste sitting around here while he stares at his breakfast, anyway.

The rest of it is about as tasteless as he expects, but he saves the apple until last, letting his eyes fall shut as he bites into it. Sharp and crisp, ripe enough that juice drips down his fingers and he has to lick it off. Wasting real food is a goddamn crime, or it should be, anyway.

When Dean opens his eyes, it’s to Cas’s swift glance away, the nervous set of his shoulders.

“Cas?” he says. “You okay?”

A small smile. “A little tired.” Cas holds out the spare coverall to him, stepping out past the curtain when Dean takes it. “How’s your leg?”

“Better, I think. I mean, not a hundred percent, obviously. But not as bad as yesterday.” The incessant painful throb of it has died down enough that Dean got a couple hours’ decent sleep. He manages to dress himself without falling on his ass, which is definitely a plus. He gets to his feet under his own steam, too, and soon they’re on their way down the stairs again, making progress a little quicker than yesterday.

It’s almost as quiet as it was late last night, even though they must be approaching the more populated levels. Just once, they hear the echo of footsteps far below them, and Cas hustles them both into the mouth of a darkened storeroom. The overwhelming quiet of Cas’s silo has one advantage: early warning.

They stand close together in the dark, breathing slow and shallow, quiet as they can. Dean feels the thump of his own heartbeat in his ears and imagines that even if it doesn’t alert the person out on the staircase to their presence, Cas, standing right next to him, must surely be able to hear it. In the sudden dark and stillness, he’s startlingly conscious of Cas’s measured breathing, the warmth and closeness of him, the solemn outline of his profile in the dimness.

They wait there for a long time, until the footsteps have faded somewhere above them. It’s only when Cas moves to open the door, nodding to him to indicate it’s safe, that Dean really registers he’s been staring, and shakes himself.

If Cas noticed, he isn’t saying anything. They keep on climbing down.

“Where is everybody, anyway?” Dean asks, low-voiced, when he can’t deal with the silence anymore. “I mean, yesterday it was pretty late when we climbed down, right? But it’s morning and there still isn’t anybody around.”

Cas nods minutely. “Our time is carefully regulated,” he says. “We work, we go to services, we eat and we sleep. Mealtimes are enough, for relaxation. To waste time dallying in corridors—”

“Might give you a second to think for yourselves?”

Cas shrugs.

“So. What do your brothers and sisters think you’re doing right now?”

“Sleeping, I hope. I pretended I had a headache, stuffed my bed with spare clothing.” He casts a glance up the stairs. The halflight seeping from the corridors picks out the great bones of the staircase, but they’re too far down now to see the top. “The dormitories are two levels up; we passed them a half hour ago.”

“Dormitories?” Dean raises an eyebrow. “You don’t even get to sleep on your own?”

“Only the married have their own bedrooms.” Cas’s voice goes stilted. “Privacy is a luxury. Luxuries make you weak.” He’s obviously reciting something.

“Talking to me, that was a luxury?” Dean says.

_Did I make you weak? Is that what I did?_

That, he doesn’t say.

 

 

 

 

Dean finds himself thinking about it, later, though. _Privacy’s a luxury_. It’s a stupid-ass notion, in his opinion. A full-sized silo with a handful of people living in it, but all shoved in together, like chickens in cages.

Like they’re hiding from the silence.

Only, Dean’s pretty damn sure that whole idea’s a sack of shit. Even in his silo—crowded everywhere you looked, overpopulated enough you had to put your name in the lottery if you wanted to have a kid—people carved out space to be alone. Or alone-together; they’re both good. Napping or fucking in supply closets on their coffee breaks; camping out on the landings with their belongings ranged around them in impromptu fortresses; even just pointedly sitting in the emptiest part of the cafeteria and staring into space, doing their damnedest to write _do not engage_ on their faces in foot-high letters.

Dean would’ve gone crazy, these last couple months, if he’d never had a moment without eyes on him. If he hadn’t been able to speak to Cas safe in the knowledge that the rest of the silo would never hear the things he said.

Maybe that’s why Cas looks so damn serious all the time. Talking to Dean might be the first thing he’s done that wasn’t for somebody else’s benefit.

Still, having nothing _but_ privacy is starting to wear Dean down. He got around to asking Cas to swipe him some tools with which to try fixing the broken radio before he left, but right now it’s just sitting uselessly beside him. He gives up staring at it eventually, disregards Cas’s injunction not to move, and makes a start on exploring the level where Cas has left him. Looks like he’s gonna be stuck here for the foreseeable future, so he may as well get to know his way around the place.

It’s a disused Supply level—Cas told him that much. Whatever was once kept in here has long since been moved upstairs, though, and the great skeletons of disused storage racks loom high over Dean’s head. When he moves among them, flashlight in hand, they cast long bars of shadow across the floor. The place is stripped completely bare. Not even a scrap of packaging left to litter the floor, just a thin layer of dust coating everything.

There are huge empty storage lockers along two walls, some of them big enough for a small family to sit down in, and Dean stashes his few possessions away in one of them. Water canteen, protein bars, spare clothes, all brought by Cas; pain meds and bandages and antiseptic wipes, swiped from the medbay. Plus the broken radio, about the only thing he really can call _his_. Cas says he’s gonna try and sneak back down later, that he’ll bring bedding and soap, if he can. Dean figures he can probably bunk down in the bottom of the locker. There’s plenty of room for him to lay out a bedroll. The door doesn’t have a key anymore, but at least it’s some kind of a hiding place if anyone does come snooping around.

A couple side doors lead off the entrance to the storage room, and Dean finds them unlocked when he tries them. The first one leads to an office. An empty desk—the same design as Dad’s—stands disused in the center of it. There’s an empty filing cabinet in one corner, a slot beside the door where the people who worked here would’ve swiped their cards to clock in. The carpet’s worn thin, threadbare with dead footsteps.

Dean tries the desk drawers, finding them unlocked and empty—apart from the bottom one. He recognises the great black brick of the Order without needing to turn the cover, but he pulls it out and opens it up anyway. The dry fragility of the pages under his fingertips and the neat black type are so familiar; it’s like looking at a warped reflection. The idea of all these worlds like his own, running in tandem, working to the same instruction manual, following the same prescribed taboos—it makes him blink with its absurdity, with the effort of stretching his brain to take it in.

He closes the Order and shoves it back inside the desk drawer.

When he opens the door to the next room along, he’s startled by the impression of a dark figure on the other side of the room, the bright burst of a flashlight. He goes tense, takes a step back, and the shift of the flashlight beam tells him it’s just his reflection.

It’s a locker room. A bench in the middle, a couple shower stalls in the far corner, a long mirror above the line of sinks.

Dean tries one of the taps, is surprised when the pipes groan—the sound making him catch his breath before it dies away—and a thin stream of water trickles out. He cups his hand under the tap and raises it to his mouth. It’s stale, a bitter-metallic aftertaste to it, but drinkable.

Still, that isn’t what he’s really thinking about right now.

He hasn’t taken a shower in days, and the quick wash he managed in the medbay this morning was a good few hours and a twenty-five-level climb ago. Now he thinks about it, he finds himself itching to get clean, the surface of his skin feeling sticky and gross, the ache in his knee crying out for warm water.

Cas told him this level was rarely visited. And the storage room is well back from the main staircase, at the far end of a long corridor. Dean decides to risk it.

He has to sit down on the bench to strip off his coverall, folding it along the bottom of the door before he switches on the light, just in case anybody not-Cas does pass by. It’s tricky, balancing on the bare tiles with his injured leg, and there isn’t anything in the way of soap, and the temperature takes a while to come right, making him wince at the cold at first—but the sluice of clean water down his skin is so fucking worth it. Dean closes his eyes and tips back his head as water sprays into his mouth, runs in rivulets down the nape of his neck. Inch by inch, he relaxes. Yeah, definitely worth it.

The sound of the water is loud in his ears, and so he doesn’t hear the door opening, the soft noise of surprise as Cas catches his foot on Dean’s coverall and almost trips.

It’s Cas’s stuttered apology that reaches his ears, the echo of his footsteps as he retreats into the corridor.

Dean turns off the water, blinking, his reverie interrupted. He balances in the entrance to the shower stall for a moment, braced with a hand against the wall, shaking droplets of water out of his hair, then pads over to the door to retrieve his clothes, leaving a trail of wet footprints across the floor. He ought to wipe those up, he guesses; keep the evidence that there’s somebody down here to a minimum.

He pulls on his boxers, and calls through the door. “Hey, Cas. It’s okay, man, you can come on in.”

The door opens a crack, and Cas’s face appears in the gap. He’s frowning, his eyes downcast, like he’s afraid of glancing up and catching another glimpse of Dean in his birthday suit. Not the kind of reaction Dean is used to getting—and kind of a surprise. Sure, modesty or whatever, but with the whole _privacy is a luxury_ thing, Cas must’ve had to share a bathroom with his brothers before now.

The curl of disappointment in Dean’s gut is a dumb thing to feel, given the circumstances. It isn’t like he doesn’t have more important things to worry about. But he feels it anyway, and maybe it’s that that has him defaulting to inappropriate, looking up at Cas with a smirk and a, “What’s up? See something you like?”

Cas ducks out behind the door again in a heartbeat. “Dean,” he says, his voice strained. “Get dressed. Please.”

He sounds more distressed than pissed off, and Dean immediately feels like a giant douche.

Fuck knows what kind of neuroses Cas’s weirdo silo has managed to drill into his brain. He might’ve started asking questions, but he isn’t gonna shed all of his conditioning at once. Expecting otherwise is stupid, and pretty damn unfair.

Dean pulls on his t-shirt and coverall. His clothes are uncomfortable, damp from his wet skin, but still, being clean is just about the best thing in the world. He closes his eyes, takes a breath, then calls out again: “Okay, man. I’m decent.”

A moment, and then Cas opens the door again, eyeing him with suspicion.

Dean sighs. “Hey,” he says. “Cas. I didn’t mean to freak you out. Dick move, I get it.”

Cas’s grip tightens on the pack he’s holding.

“I’m sorry,” Dean says. “Won't happen again, okay?”

“Okay,” Cas says, finally.

Dean nods at the space beside him on the bench, and after a second’s hesitation, Cas sits.

“I brought you some things,” he says, and hands Dean the pack. “You’ll be okay here, for now.” He inclines his head, indicating the space around them and, by extension, the level. His eyes sharpen, then, his voice turning to grit with warning. “But you need to be careful. Don’t leave this level, whatever you do.”

Dean must’ve left the door to the other room open, or maybe the storage locker; some indication that he’s been wandering around. Which is dumb, yeah, but he isn’t dumb enough to go wandering around the rest of the silo by himself, and he bristles.

“Okay, okay,” he says. “I can take care of myself, Cas, I ain’t some kid.”

“My apologies.” Cas looks down for a second, but when he glances back up, his eyes are as intense as ever. “But if my brethren find you—”

“—you’re in serious shit, I know. I get it. I’ll be careful.”

“It isn’t me I’m worried about,” Cas says, but when Dean looks up at him curiously, he averts his eyes.

He decides against asking further questions in favor of digging through the pack Cas brought down with him. There’s a spare set of clothes in there (“I hope they fit you, I, uh, had to guess the size,” Cas says, apologetic, and shit, he even looks embarrassed by _that_ ), soap and toothpaste and a towel, and—praise fucking Jesus—a miniature toolkit and a bag of miscellaneous radio components. More food, too, including two shiny apples nestled in the bottom of the pack, cushioned by the towel.

Dean looks up at Cas, wide-eyed. “Dude,” he says. “How’d you get all of this so fast?”

“I offered to run some errands during my shift. Anna works on the farms. She snuck me the apples.” Cas frowns a little. “I didn’t tell her why, but I expect she’ll ask, eventually. I’ll need to think of something to tell her.”

“And the other stuff?”

Cas clears his throat. “I stole it from the Supply levels.”

“Cas.” Dean waits until Cas looks up again, looks at him. “Thank you. Seriously. I appreciate this, I do. And I know I’m gonna need most of this stuff—I mean, I never thought I’d be so damn happy to see a bar of soap, you know? But—apples? Those _are_ a luxury, man. And you don’t gotta do that. Risk yourself when you don’t need to. Not for me.”

Cas’s gaze drops. “I know,” he says, after a moment. “I—”

He breaks off, and Dean’s opening his mouth around an apology—because yeah, he’s already pissed Cas off once today, and he doesn’t want to sound like an ungrateful asshole, the guy doesn’t deserve that—when Cas looks him in the eye and goes on.

“You’re always alone here,” he says. “It’s hard for me to imagine what that’s like. But I wanted—”

“Cas.” Dean cuts him off, but then doesn’t know what to say.

It’s hard to wrap his head around, that Cas—this pretty-much-stranger (even if he is one hell of a pretty stranger)—didn’t just save Dean’s ass, he wanted to do something nice for him. Dean’s world hasn’t had much room for random acts of kindness in it lately, and it’s kind of pathetic how this one gets to him, has him swallowing around a lump in his throat.

“Cas,” he says again, eventually. “Thank you, man. I mean it.”

The tired little smile he gets in return is a better gift than apples or miniature screwdrivers, and on impulse, Dean pulls the pack up onto his lap and reaches into the bottom of it. He pulls out both the apples, and holds one out to Cas.

Who blinks at it. Dean waves it under his nose. “C’mon,” he urges. “Least I can do.”

After a second’s hesitation, Cas takes it from him, the brush of his fingers rough and warm. He holds it for a moment longer before sighing, tension visibly leaking out of the set of his shoulders, and taking a bite.

His eyes slide shut and he’s still for a moment, savouring, an unaccustomed softness replacing his usual frown. Dean can’t help staring. It’s just this little flash of peace, of simplicity, that makes the tense weariness that seems to be Cas’s default state show up in sharp relief. Dean wonders when the last time he relaxed and enjoyed something actually was. Questioning the shit he’s been brought up to believe is one thing, but allowing himself pleasure? That’s another, and it doesn’t look like it’s something Cas does a whole lot of. Doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of relaxing goes on around here.

Dean feels a pang of sadness at that thought. That Cas is as tired and as miserable as he is, but doesn’t even have food or sex or booze or dumb jokes to blow off steam with.

Cas’s eyes open, then, and Dean averts his gaze as fast as he can, just catching Cas scrubbing a drip of juice off of his chin with the back of his hand out the corner of his eye. He crunches a big bite out of his own apple to avoid any curious looks or awkward questions.

That momentary look of peace on Cas’s face is gone as quickly as it came, and it doesn’t come back. Soon enough he’s gathering up the apple cores, wrapping them in plastic to be thrown away, and saying, “I should go.” His shoulders sag, the weight on them apparently back.

Dean watches him get up to leave. He swallows before he speaks—cautious, because he doesn’t wanna step in it again, but he doesn’t wanna just shut his trap and act like it’s not his problem, either. After all, he’s Cas’s problem right now, no two ways about it. Least he can do is return the favour.

“What happened?” he asks, and Cas freezes before the door, one hand on the handle.

“What do you mean?” he says.

Dean shrugs. “I mean, you seem—stressed out. I dunno, maybe you’re always stressed out, but—if you wanna tell me about it. Then you can.” Yeah, he sounds like a real walking advertisement for emotional articulacy right now. Just the kind of guy you want to spill your guts to. “You don’t have to—I ain’t exactly good at this shit. But.” He shrugs. “You know.”

Cas doesn’t sit back down, but he does turn around, take a couple steps back towards Dean. A tired smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. “Thank you,” he says.

Dean raises an eyebrow. “So?”

“So.” Cas lets out a sigh. “What I do—we monitor the airwaves. What’s being said on the radio, between the various silo heads, and within Silo One. We stay silent; we simply listen. We stay aware of what’s happening out there, though it isn’t our place to interfere.”

Dean nods, slowly. “Okay,” he says. “So, what’s the problem with that?”

“It’s Silo One.” Cas seems to deflate even further, if that’s possible. “They _know_.”

Dean’s heart is in his throat, suddenly; there’s blood rushing in his ears like the roar of a generator inside his head, and he can’t believe what he’s just heard.

“What?” he says, and it comes out rougher than he intends, ragged-edged with danger. “And you didn’t tell me this first?”

“Not that you’re here.” Cas shakes his head. “There’s no way they could know that. As far as they’re concerned, this silo is dead. They don’t even know you’re still alive—not necessarily. But they know that someone from your silo was sent to cleaning yesterday morning. And that that person climbed up the bank and disappeared from view.” He looks at Dean, all intent focus again, now; the kind of look that makes him want to shift and shuffle his feet like a kid caught climbing on the stair rail. “That’s not supposed to happen. That’s never happened.”

 _Never_. Huh.

“So,” Dean says. “What does that mean? The rest of your guys know I’m here? They’re gonna come looking for me?”

“No. Not at first, anyway.” Cas hesitates over his next words. “They’ll want to know what happened. Whether you made it any further than the bank. The assumption right now is that you didn’t—or not by much. So they won’t be looking for a living person. They’ll be looking for a body. _Outside_.”

“Oh.” Dean’s throat goes dry as the implications sink in, and the word doesn’t come out right. “Oh,” he says, again. “Fuck.”

“Yes, that’s one way of putting it,” Cas says, but there’s no humour in his eyes now.

“You know who they’re gonna send?” Dean abruptly wishes he hadn’t eaten that apple, because it’s gonna look seriously ungrateful if he pukes it up all over the floor tiles.

Cas’s expression is carefully blank. “Somebody who is deemed in need of redemption.”

“Shit, Cas. You—you think it might be you?”

“I’m afraid of it.” Cas looks down, then. “I’m also afraid it might not be.”

Surprise jerks Dean’s head up, puts a momentary stop to the churn of worry in his gut. “Dude, what the fuck?”

Cas doesn’t meet his eyes. He’s quiet for a moment; slow and careful when he speaks. “You remember,” he says, at last, “I told you I’d lost a brother, recently?”

“Yeah.”

“He was young,” Cas says. “He’d begun asking questions—and he didn’t have the self-control necessary to keep out of trouble, to stay quiet when necessary. If I’d just talked to him—” He breaks off, composes his mouth into a rigid line. “The sister who runs our section, Naomi—she was looking for excuses to be rid of him.”

Dean feels his stomach drop. He doesn’t need to ask what _be rid of_ means.

“I missed an important piece of information from Silo One,” Cas goes on.

“Let me guess.” Dean sighs. “You were talking to me.”

Cas nods. “When it came to light that we’d missed something, Samandriel got the blame. Naomi was only too happy to pin it on him. She—she accused him of deliberately hiding things. Of _sedition_. Never mind that he wasn’t even in the room at the time. The penalty for that—”

“Yeah, you don’t need to tell me.”

“Maybe if he’d admitted it, apologised, offered to recant his beliefs—but he wouldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t. It wasn’t his fault.” Cas hangs his head. He looks devastated, and something about this doesn’t hang together right.

“Wait,” Dean says. “So, you just watched while this happened? Cas, I know we don’t exactly go back, but I dunno—that doesn’t sound like you.”

The smile Cas turns on him is pained. “No,” he says. “I was sent to the down deeps to run an errand. It couldn’t have been better timed if she’d planned it. I didn’t find out until I returned. By then it was too late.” His mouth twists unhappily. “But it was my fault. If I hadn’t slipped up—”

“She’d have found another way,” Dean insists, interrupting him. “Trust me. She sounds a hell of a lot like somebody I know.” He pauses. “I get it, though. Feeling like it’s on you.”

He knows how heavy guilt can weigh, how little anything reasonable anyone says can do to lift it. Why Cas is so fucking freaked by the idea of having another death on his conscience. Ellen, all those other people killed in the blasts—and the fear half his silo lives in now—all of that is on Dean. He wouldn’t wish that feeling on anyone. Well, maybe Ruby and those psycho-fuck suicide bombers, but. He wouldn’t wish it on Cas.

Cas isn’t looking at him, eyes unfocused, off in a haze of guilt. Dean gets to his feet—a little easier than it was earlier—and puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Look,” he says. “Cas.”

A blink, and then another, and Cas is coming back to him, focusing. He finds he’s actually glad of that piercing gaze.

“I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t saved my ass. _That’s_ on you, so you can stick a tick in the plus column or whatever.” He pauses, risks cracking a smile he doesn’t really feel. “Though hey, gimme a few days, I’m sure I can have you counting it as a minus.”

It falls flat, like Dean’s jokes tend to do with Cas, but Cas gives him a wide-eyed look that has nothing to do with humour. He closes his eyes, then, leans briefly into Dean’s touch.

“Thank you,” he says, very quietly.

A thought occurs to Dean, just as Cas makes to leave again. “You said your silo doesn’t send people to cleaning,” he points out.

“That’s right,” Cas says. “The viewscreen stopped working in the early years after our silo went dark. Our Father took it as a sign—that we were to perfect ourselves and grow strong in order to become worthy of the outside world, not waste our time in coveting it before the day came.”

“Right,” Dean says. “So, what does happen to the people who get sentenced to—you know?”

“Dissenters die within the silo,” Cas tells him. His expression freezes on his face. “There are so few of us—we can’t afford to waste perfectly good bodies.”

That’s what happens to most people who die back in Dean’s silo; they’re buried in the soil of the mids, with a simple ceremony celebrating the fact that they’ll give life to the silo by feeding its plants. Funerals are one of the few occasions you always get fresh fruit. Usually apples.


	12. Chapter 12

 

Cas doesn’t bring him any more apples.

Honestly, Dean isn’t complaining about that. But Cas is still wound up tight, and between the worrying and the sneaking around to bring Dean things—food and painkillers, flashlight batteries, a wristwatch—he doesn’t look like he’s sleeping much. The smudges of shadow under his eyes darken, and his smiles are flimsy things.

Dean remembers the brief flicker of happiness he saw from Cas on his first day down here, and he misses it.

He doesn’t dwell on it, though. He has enough other stuff to dwell on.

Silo One are who Ruby answers to; he knows that much. They know he got away, though not where he is. He wonders what’s happening at home right now. What kind of shit his friends are in; how hard IT is tightening its grip on the silo. If Sammy’s still locked away in that server room. If he’s still hanging in there, or if he’s been brainwashed by whatever it is that IT does to its recruits behind closed doors. If he believes Dean’s dead. If he thinks the whole thing is Dean’s fault.

Dean wouldn’t blame him if he did. He almost doesn’t want to know.

But he has to. It’s a goddamn compulsion. So he eases the cracked plastic case off of the radio, takes up the tools and components Cas brought for him, and delves into the guts of it to fix it up. He’s sitting on his bedroll in the storage locker, hunched over the thing, when Cas sneaks down late in the evening, before his nightshift, with a bag of rations and an expression so disconsolate it makes Dean’s stomach do somersaults with dread.

“What’s up?” he asks, taking the bag Cas holds out to him.

Most of the time, Cas just stands there awkwardly while they talk, hands hanging at his sides like he doesn’t know what to do with them. Dean’s tried to put the guy at his ease, but his jokes and welcoming gestures don’t seem to do shit most of the time. Today, though, Cas just gives this whole-body shudder and sinks down onto the bedroll beside Dean without being asked. He sits there hunched up with his knees in front of his chin.

“They’re sending someone out to search the area first thing in the morning,” he says, after a long minute’s silence. He isn’t looking at Dean, his eyes fixed on the empty air in front of him.

“Someone you know, huh?”

A half-turn of Cas’s head, an impatient huff. “We all know each other here. We’re—”

“All brothers and sisters, yeah, I get it. You know what I mean, Cas. Someone you’re—I don’t know. Friends with, or whatever.”

“In a sense, yes.”

Cas doesn’t elaborate, and the silence turns painful before Dean clears his throat, ventures, “You wanna talk about it?”

“Is that supposed to help?”

Dean shrugs. “So they tell me.”

Cas favours him with the tiniest hint of a smile before he goes back to staring into space. Dean’s begun to figure his offer’s fallen on deaf ears, like everything else, when Cas’s voice breaks the silence again.

“Balthazar,” he says.

Dean blinks at him. “What now?”

“The brother who’s been chosen to go outside.” Cas pauses, the set of his mouth tightening. “When we were younger. We were—close.”

“Huh,” Dean says, “Okay,” and then he registers the awkward way Cas is not-looking at him—not in a reverie anymore; deliberately avoiding his eyes—and understands what Cas isn’t saying. He turns his head to look Cas full in the face. “Cas, man,” he says. “Was that—was that a euphemism? Were you guys _together_?”

Cas says nothing. Dean nudges his shoulder, gently.

“Hey,” he says, “you don’t have to lie to me about that shit, okay? I ain’t some homophobic douchebag.”

Cas turns to look at him then, brows knitting together in genuine confusion.

“I mean, I don’t give a fuck who you fuck,” Dean explains. “Or want to fuck, whatever.” It figures Cas has never heard the word before, if his crazy silo has raised him to think the way he is is wrong. Assholes don’t walk around calling themselves assholes, after all. Dean shrugs. “Hey, I’ve been with a couple guys myself. Hot people are hot people, why would I limit my options?”

There was Aaron from Supply, back when they were both shadows, and a couple one-time hook-ups whose names have long since faded into obscurity. Plus his embarrassing-in-hindsight teenage crush on Benny, who was twenty-five and seemed like the coolest thing in the whole damn silo at the time, and talked to Dean like he was an equal and not just a dumb kid. He must’ve been pretty annoying; he just thanks his lucky stars Benny took it with such good grace.

Cas just looks at him. Not with the scandalized expression Dean’s half-expecting; he bites his lower lip, his eyes downcast, and says, “It’s our duty to keep up our numbers. To marry and procreate.”

“What, and you gotta try to be someone you’re not because some dude said that once? You can’t be honest?”

“We don’t have that luxury.”

There’s that word again. Dean grimaces. “So,” he says. “You and this Balthazar guy. I’m guessing it was a top-secret kinda thing?”

Cas nods.

“And you couldn’t keep it up?”

The way Cas lowers his eyes says it all. “It wasn’t the way you think,” he says, after a moment. “I didn’t—break his heart.” He hesitates. “He just—I always felt that he thought less of me, afterwards. I was afraid, and...” He trails off.

“Yeah, well,” Dean says to him. “Look at you now. Rescuing strangers left, right, and center.”

Cas gives him this weird little look, half-smiling, half-troubled, and they both fall silent. They sit there for a long moment, side by side, staring out into the deserted storage racks.

 

 

 

 

When Cas leaves—which is too soon, like always—Dean gets back to work on the radio. It’s his default setting, when he’s feeling like crap: do something with his hands. Fix something.

Cas brought him a bigger flashlight, plus a stash of spare batteries, and Dean manages to angle it on top of a makeshift tower built out of his few possessions so that it produces a ring of light he can work in. It lets him stay hidden away in the storage locker, so he doesn’t have to worry about being discovered while he’s intent on what he’s doing. He can just let the circle of light and the radio become his world for a little while.

There’s no hope for the cracked plastic casing, so Dean shoves that into a corner with all of his other trash. Fixing up the inner workings is a pretty simple thing, though. Nothing in there is fucked-up enough to need soldering, and soon Dean has the radio hissing to life. He fiddles with the frequency, listening for hints of voices in the static. Voices from home.

He doesn’t hear anything.

He’s gonna have to ask Cas for help. He does this all night up there—listens out to the voices of other silos on the radio. There has to be some way to get through, right? And if there is, Cas is the only person he has to talk to about it.

Dean kind of hates to ask. It isn’t just that it reminds him of his own helplessness—though, sure, he’d be lying if he said his pride didn’t have a hand in it. But more than that, it’s the idea of pushing Cas for even more than he offers, more than he’s already given. The guy’s done so much to help him, and he looks so fucking tired all the time. Dean just wishes he could give something back.

 

 

 

 

He’s sitting there, listening intermittently to the wordless hiss of the radio, when Cas comes back down.

Cas doesn’t say much, just a low, “Hello, Dean,” to alert Dean to his presence. He sets down his pack just outside the storage locker and hovers there, not sitting down this time. Not that Dean can see much, with just his flashlight to go by, but Cas is looking kind of grey in the face. Faded.

Dean gives a sigh, and pats the bedroll next to him. Cas just looks at his hand for a moment, like all of his non-verbal communication centers have given up the ghost, before he slumps down beside Dean in a disconsolate heap.

“You alright?” Dean asks, and Cas actually gives a desperate, mirthless little laugh. He falls silent, then; doesn’t reply.

Shit, Dean isn’t good at this stuff. The feelings talk. He bottles all that shit up, and once in a while he gets drunk or angry and word-vomits all over Sam’s or Bobby’s or Lisa’s shoulder, and then in the morning he keeps his trap firmly shut and goes right back to pretending everything’s fine. The listening part, he isn’t much better at. He can’t hear about other people’s misery without wanting to fix it, and when he can’t fix it he ends up stewing in his own helplessness, angry, in a dumb-inconsiderate-asshole kind of a way, at the person suffering for reminding him just how useless he is. Asking about the practical side of things isn’t gonna be any less depressing. If Balthazar went up there, then the higher-ups know there was no body on the ground _outside_. That doesn’t mean they’ve figured out Dean is in the silo—but it means they’re one step closer to getting there. Not that that really changes anything. The danger’s always been there, and talking about it won’t help.

So instead of pushing Cas for an answer, Dean turns his head, gestures at the radio lying there in its little circle of flashlight. “You think you can give me a hand with this?” he says. “I got it working, but I can’t find the frequencies they’re using back home. You listen to that stuff upstairs, right? Think you could take a look?”

Cas frowns, but he turns to look at the thing, picks it up and turns it over in his hands without speaking. He fiddles with the dial, listens with furrowed brows, and then fiddles some more.

His frown turns to one of concentration, some of the heaviness seeming to drop out of his frame, and Dean feels something tightly-wound loosen inside his chest. He watches Cas work. The careful movements of his hands; the shadows his eyelashes cast on his cheeks as he concentrates.

Eventually, Cas goes still at some barely-perceptible sound amid the wash of static.

“There,” he says. He makes a tiny adjustment to the dial, and the muddy hiss resolves itself into a voice.

The voice is unfamiliar, has a measured cadence that sounds like it’s repeating something long-practised.

 _…need to ensure that you understand the importance of your position_ , the voice is saying. It pauses. _Let’s begin._

Dean glances sideways at Cas, who’s regarding the radio with intent, serious eyes. He looks at Dean, mouths, _Silo One_. Dean’s eyes widen.

 _Do you swear_ , the voice goes on, _to uphold the Order and the Legacy, to the letter, in secrecy, whatever the cost?_

And then Dean feels his insides turn to stone, because the voice that answers, _Yes_ , is Sam’s.

His hand seems to move of its own accord, hitting the ‘off’ switch before he has time to register what he’s doing, as though silencing the radio might erase what he’s just heard from his brain.

“Dean?” Cas says, close to his ear, and he realises his hand is trembling.

“That.” He swallows. “What was that?”

“Silo heads and their deputies are sworn in by the head of Silo One, after they’ve studied the Order and the Legacy in detail. The ceremony has used those words for generations.” Cas is watching him curiously. “I’ve heard them many times.”

“What’s a _legacy_?”

“The Legacy is the history of the silos—and of the world before them. The world of the Ancients. Our Father shared that knowledge with all of his children. The inhabitants of other silos are not so lucky.”

Dean shuts his eyes for a moment, does his best to steady himself, fingernails digging into his palms. Sam knows. Sam knows everything—more than Dean does, even. And—what? Something in it changed his mind? Made him decide to join up with Ruby’s murderous cause?

When he opens his eyes, Cas is looking at him with undisguised worry.

“Cas,” he says, when he trusts his voice to come out without shaking. “You know all that stuff—could you teach me about it?”

Cas hunches forward. “It would be difficult to get our books down here,” he says. “The classrooms are in the center of the inhabited levels, and there’s no likely excuse I could use for being there.”

Dean deflates. “Crap.”

Cas looks at him sharply. “I didn’t say _no_. I will find a way.” He pauses, worries at his lower lip. “Dean,” he says, at last. “Who was that? On the radio? You knew them.”

“Yeah.” Dean exhales, short and harsh. “I’ll say I did. That was Sam.”

The understanding that dawns in Cas’s eyes quickly gives way to sorrow. “Dean,” he begins. “I’m—”

“Don’t,” Dean cuts him off, before he can get to _sorry_. “I—shit. Guess we’re as miserable as each other.”

Cas doesn’t say anything further, just leans in gently against him, their shoulders brushing. After a moment, Dean feels Cas’s head drop onto his shoulder. The solidity of his presence is strangely comforting, and Dean leans back into him and closes his eyes.

 

 

 

 

Dean dreams about drowning again, later that night.

It’s the same dream as before. He’s in an abandoned, flooded silo, sinking further and further into the water, while Sam reaches a hand out to him and Ruby appears behind him to push him under.

But this time, she doesn’t. She reaches out, puts her hand on Sam’s shoulder, slides it down his arm and interlaces her fingers with his. She tugs at it to get him to turn around, draws him away from the water, away from Dean. And he goes.

Dean’s lungs hurt. In the faint light filtering down from the up tops, the world around him is unfamiliar with decay. His overall is sodden and heavy, dragging him down, and he kicks feebly upward but it’s so far away—so far—too far.

He’s in the middle of the central staircase, still sinking. The level above him recedes, and he searches for the stair rail in the gloom. Reaches out a hand for it, forces his legs to kick again, but he misjudges and misses and he’s still sinking.

That’s when he feels something tugging at his sleeve. He turns, flapping his arm, unwieldy in the water.

Cas. He’s pale, a weird greenish cast to his face, strands of his unkempt hair swaying as he bobs up and down.

He holds out his hand. Dean looks at him, and even though they can’t talk, Dean gets what he's saying.

Dean grasps his arm, and they make for the surface.

They’re both drowning. There’s no way they’re gonna make it. But if they’re already done for, better to go down kicking, right?

Better not to go down on your own.

 

 

 

 

It’s early afternoon before Dean gets up the nerve to switch the damn radio back on.

He knows it’s pathetic, shying away like a frightened kid from what he might hear on the other end, but every time he remembers Sam’s voice, firm and clear, saying, _Yes_ , his hand trembles and he draws it back from the switch.

It's no wonder Dad didn’t trust him with his ideas, didn’t come to him for help. Maybe Dean’s just too goddamn weak to handle the truth, and Dad knew it.

Maybe Sam knows it, too. Maybe that’s why he’s gone over to Ruby’s side. Maybe he changed his mind even before Dean was sent to cleaning, figured that even ruthless, dogmatic nutjobs like Ruby and her cronies had a better chance of keeping order in the silo than his wreck of a brother.

Well, Dean knows the worst, now. There’s nothing out there that could fuck him up more than this. He takes a deep breath and flips the switch.

Static.

It’s partly disappointment that he feels, but mostly it’s relief.

Dean leaves the radio on. Probably shouldn’t—he’s gonna burn through the batteries Cas brought him in no time. But he’s gotten up the courage to flip the switch and he’s damn well getting what he can out of it, so he shuts the door to the storage locker and folds his bedroll along the bottom of it, the way he did when he was working with the flashlight, and he keeps listening.

He sits there for hours in the dark, static washing through him. Long enough that his brain starts playing tricks on him, forming words out of white noise that he finds himself straining to catch, even though there’s nobody there. When he realises he’s doing it, he scowls and squashes down the urge. There’s no message his subconscious could come up with that he wants to hear.

Cas shows up again late in the evening. He’s taken to waking up early before his nightshifts, sneaking down to Dean with food stolen from the canteen while the rest of his ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ are still sleeping. Sometimes he manages to get away early after his shift, too. Morning services are mandatory—which sounds more like cruel and unusual punishment than spiritual guidance, far as Dean’s concerned. Working a full night’s shift and then sitting through an hour of prayers before you get dinner? No thanks. But they’re followed by mealtimes and a short recreation period, and if Cas claims a headache or an urgent need to go pray, the others just assume he’s gone back to the dorm. He says that nobody’s caught on yet, and Dean can believe that he’s quiet and unobtrusive enough most people don’t notice him sneaking around. But he still has that tired, haunted look about him, and it’s pretty obvious he’s waiting anxiously for the day that they do.

Dean would like to clear some of those shadows away from his eyes. He’d do it, if Cas would just give him the chance. He’d make Cas forget for a little while. He’s good at that. Hell, it’d make him feel like he’s done something right, for once, in the giant-sized shitshow his life has become. But Cas is as wound-tight as ever, and the last thing Dean wants to do is push him away. So he keeps his trap shut.

Yeah, he thinks about it, in the moments when he isn’t worrying about Sam or about what else is happening back home. Dean doesn’t have much on his mind that isn’t depressing as fuck, and he isn’t selfless enough to deny himself the distraction. So he imagines telling Cas he’s fucking gorgeous, just to see his eyes widen in surprise; telling him, _I want you to fuck me_ , just to make him blush and stumble over his words. But he hasn’t actually been that kind of an asshole in a long time, so he just looks up when Cas opens the door, shuts off the radio and gives him a tiny, genuine smile.

Cas sits down next to him instead of hovering. That’s starting to be a habit, which Dean figures is one step in the right direction, at least. The pack he’s carrying with him drops at his feet with a heavy thud.

Dean eyes it questioningly. Catching his glance, Cas reaches into the pack, and a proud little smile brightens his face for a moment at he pulls out a real, thick, black-bound volume. He smooths his palm across the cover before handing it over.

It looks like the Order, only the words embossed on the spine are different. _Legacy_ , it reads. _Book One_.

“I said I would find a way,” Cas tells him, and Dean looks at him wide-eyed.

“How’d you do it?” he asks.

Cas ducks his head. “Hannah,” he says. “The sister who runs the classroom. We’re—friends, I suppose. She once said that she… admired me.” He frowns a little. “I told her—I was afraid my faith was slipping. I needed to remind myself of the world that waits for us out there, of the gift Our Father left for us. To be strong. She let me take the book.”

Dean looks at him sideways. “You told her the truth?”

“In a sense.” Cas looks surprised. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.” His troubled expression is back in a flash, though. “I must confess I have no desire to be strong. That would entail—”

He trails off, and Dean finishes for him: “Handing me over to your lunatic bosses? Well, no offence, Cas, but I ain’t about to start lamenting your loss of faith.”

He nudges Cas with his elbow to soften it, and Cas turns a faint smile on him. “I wouldn’t hand you over,” he says, and despite the smile, he sounds deadly serious. Dean can’t help but smile back.

“So,” he says, to break up all that seriousness. “Teacher’s got the hots for you, huh?”

It’s as gentle a jab as he’s capable of, but Cas still meets it with downcast eyes.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” he says, though Dean’s pretty sure his tone and the waggle of his eyebrows didn’t leave much room for conjecture.

“This Hannah chick. She _admires_ you. That’s gotta mean something.”

Dean isn’t really sure why he’s pushing it, except that his conversations with Cas are the highlight of his day, and he just wants to see the guy lighten up a little. He also isn’t sure why he’s feeling a vague resentment towards Hannah, despite the fact she’s the reason he has a chance to find out what’s going on in the world out there. He glances sideways at Cas, at the dim light picking out the planes of his face, the softness of his mouth, the dark shine of his eyes. It isn't like he can blame the girl for noticing.

Still, when Cas’s frown lines deepen and he lets out an unhappy sigh before saying, “I’m afraid so”—well, Dean would be lying if he said he wasn’t relieved.

“Not your type?” he says.

Cas laughs, sort of—it’s more like a pained little huff of breath. “Not exactly,” he says. “But—” He breaks off.

“But?” Dean asks, puzzled. “Dude, you don’t gotta marry her, just flash her those baby blues so she keeps letting you borrow the books.”

“It isn’t that simple.” Cas pauses. “As I said before—it’s our duty to marry and increase our numbers, so that when the time comes we leave behind children to inherit the earth.” He blinks. “At least, that’s what Our Father taught. I’m already too old to be unmarried. My selfishness will begin to draw comment soon.”

“Selfishness?” Dean has to fight to keep his voice down, seeing Cas look so disconsolate. “What, so you’re supposed to just marry someone because some dead guy says so, and you both end up miserable as fuck because you don’t feel that way about her? What’s so unselfish about that?”

Cas just shrugs, not looking at him. His customary scowl has given way to blankness. Dean figures this is how Cas looks when he’s too miserable even to be pissed off about something.

“That’s why you left him,” Dean realises, the words out before his brain-to-mouth interface has time to kick in. “Your—whatever-he-was. Balthazar. You wanted him to be able to get married and not have to sneak around with you on the side.”

Cas nods, mutely.

“You didn’t break his heart. You broke yours.”

For a moment, Cas doesn’t say anything. When he does, his voice is strained. “I’d prefer not to talk about it anymore.”

It isn’t a reprimand. Dean recognises the look on his face, the note of desperation. It’s what you look like when you gotta put a lid on it right now, or else you’ll explode rage and sadness all over the place like a can of compressed air getting punctured.

Well, the whole thing makes sense of why Cas was so touchy about Dean’s dumb little attempt at flirting, his first day here. He doubts there’s much casual fun being had around these parts, and something tells him Cas’s ‘family’ don’t go in for the kind of marriages where both parties cheerily go around fucking other people on the side with the other’s permission. Hide who you are, no sex before marriage, and then it’s time to join the mandatory breeding programme. That’d be enough to screw with anybody’s head.

“Okay,” Dean says. And then, after a moment, “Not gonna lie, Cas, that’s a dumb attitude. I get why he was pissed at you. But it ain’t a selfish one. _You_ aren’t selfish. Someone oughta tell you that.” He sighs. “Your silo fucked you up real good, didn’t it?”

No reply, and for a minute Dean’s afraid that he’s pushed it too far, Cas is gonna retreat into himself and make his excuses and leave.

When Cas turns to him and says—gently, no hint of pushback in it—“I could say the same to you,” Dean’s surprised enough that he actually laughs.

“Yeah,” he says. “Got me there.”

Cas does get up, then. “I should go,” he says, but it’s apologetic. “I’ll be back in the morning.” He hovers there for a moment, makes an aborted gesture with one arm, like he’s maybe about to pat Dean’s shoulder or hug him or something. He doesn’t, though, just goes back to standing there with his hands hanging awkwardly at his sides.

Dean smiles up at him, brushes his fingers over the cover of the heavy Legacy volume. “Thanks, Cas,” he says.

Cas nods. “You, too.” There’s something new and soft in his voice, in his eyes, but he’s gone before Dean can do more than wonder at it.

He turns to the book, instead. He puts the radio back on, though he isn’t honestly sure whether the background hiss of it makes him more or less tight-strung with anxiety, flips open the Legacy, and starts reading.

 _At the time of writing_ , it begins, _human beings have lived on this planet for approximately 200,000 years. We have penetrated into the harshest and least hospitable areas of the earth’s surface. We have fought wars for territory; erased our rivals; rewritten one another’s histories; crowded our cities to bursting, and stamped our presence on areas of the most outstanding natural beauty. Nature has retaliated against us with earthquakes, with hurricanes, with the melting of the ice caps and the flooding of once-habitable areas. Still, the surface of this planet has been ours. We have survived it all._

_That all changes now. Our analysts have foreseen the coming catastrophe. It is of humanity’s own making, and if humanity is to survive it, we must act quickly. You, our descendants, live in the refuges we have built for you. In these volumes, we set down the history of the earth._

_Save it, for the children who are our future. Save it, and pass it on._

 

 

 

 

The whole thing’s written in the same pompous, doom-mongering register, and Dean decides that the Ancients must’ve had paper coming out their asses, because he’s fifteen pages in before whoever wrote the thing gets to the point and makes a start on the history. Having been brought up on this stuff goes some way to explaining why Cas talks like he does, at least.

Thinking about Cas, Dean’s starting to find, awakens this sad little ache somewhere deep inside of him. It isn’t painful, like thinking about Sam is, but if he dwells on Cas too long he gets this weird, empty feeling where his hands ache to touch something and he finds himself running through all the things he'll say to Cas when he comes back inside his head. So he pushes it down, pushes it all down, and tries to get himself absorbed in the Legacy, portentous, get-to-the-damn-point-please writing style and all.

This is what he has to do, he reminds himself. To know what the fuck could’ve possessed Sam to throw his lot in with Ruby. To understand.

He does get into it, eventually. All the pontificating in the world can’t stop the scale of the ideas being awesome. Dean knew, in theory, that people used to live on the surface, but not how many of them. Cities the size of a thousand silos, dotted all over the globe. The lights going on and blanketing the land with glitter for miles around, so that people couldn’t see the stars any better than Sam could through the dusty viewscreen. The idea of all that life is crazy enough—but it’s the idea of all that _space_ that really gets him.

On his brief trip _outside_ , he just got the vaguest sense of it, too busy fighting the tearing wind and his own protesting body to take a good look at the grey-brown wasteland that replaced the visor’s colour-saturated fantasy. He didn’t stop to look at the horizon, and he kinda wishes he’d had time to do that, now. The same way you don’t really understand the size of a silo until you lay on your back at the bottom of the staircase in the down deeps and look at it spiralling away above you, he figures the viewscreen can’t really show you how huge the sky is, how far over your head.

And space stretching around to the sides of you, too. That’s tougher to wrap his head around. The idea that you could run and run until you dropped, and nothing would get in your way. It makes Dean feel a little dizzy, just imagining it. How far you could go. How you could actually get lost, something that happens to nobody in the silo once they’re old enough to count the levels.

It might actually be—not bad, Dean thinks, to feel that small. To know that the whole huge world was all around you, just going about its business, no matter how badly you screwed up.

Of course, it ain’t all good. There’s a spectre hanging over the pages, showing up again and again in the stories, and dry statistics and formal wording can’t disguise the horror of it completely.

 _War_ isn’t a word Dean hears too often. The easiest way of understanding it, he figures, is that it’s like the violence that engulfed his silo when he was a little kid, only multiplied by hundreds—by thousands—by hundreds of thousands. Sometimes the people who lived together on a particular piece of land would start ripping each other to shreds; other times they’d arm themselves and march on the guys next door, or travel halfway across the world to whale on the people who lived there.

There’s something epic about the scale of it in the early days; something awesome about the technology in the later history, the idea of weapons that could devastate cities in a single blast. But the numbers of the dead are epic, too. Thousands on thousands of them, not even given proper burials where their bodies would feed the crops, just left there to rot.

Like the people sent to cleaning. Dean thinks again about the punishing grey of the _outside_ , and then he thinks about the simulation, all those images of rocks that hid dead people, and he slams the Legacy shut, feeling a twist of sickness in his gut.

He’s gotten to be unaware of what’s going on around him, with his head stuck in the Legacy, and he startles, sucking in a sharp breath, when he hears a faint noise that might be footsteps out on the stairs.

Dean silences the radio, cursing himself inside of his head for his dopiness, doing his damnedest to keep his breathing quiet. Takes a look at the time display on his wrist.

It’s just after three, nowhere near time for Cas to show up again. (Time for Dean to be getting sleepy, really, only he seems to have turned nocturnal, staying awake later and later while he knows Cas is up and about somewhere in the silo above him, sleeping in the day, when he knows Cas is in his bunk.) He switches off the flashlight and sits very still, listening hard.

The footsteps grow fainter, receding—as far as Dean can tell; hard to know, at this distance—down into the depths of the silo.

Which is weird. Mechanical is the only part of the lower floors that’s in use, according to Cas, the generator that powers the silo too heavy and too unwieldy to be moved up the staircase. But shift changes down there take place all at once, groups of brothers and sisters travelling the lonely, echoing lower floors together.

The footsteps fade away and don’t come back, and eventually Dean shrugs and turns his flashlight back on, figuring it must be some poor unfortunate bastard who’s been sent to take a message.

He manages to banish the thought of the wasteland _outside_ , with all of its fallen bodies, eventually, and he goes back to the Legacy.

There’s something weird about it—something he didn’t notice before, something he only notices when the stories of conflict end and the next chapter picks up with something way less interesting about economic systems.

For all the Legacy’s talk of war, it never once mentions the one that ended it all. The Ancients knew something was coming, but they shy away from saying what. There’s a shit-ton of history about stuff that happened centuries before the silos got built. The American Civil War, the World Wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—that’s all there. But what devastated the surface of the earth? What left humanity cowering under the ground like this? There are no answers.


	13. Chapter 13

 

Dean does get sleepy, eventually, and he dozes off with his head pillowed half on the Legacy, half on the pack stuffed with dirty clothes he’s been using as a pillow.

He dreams about Cas again.

Only this time, he isn’t drowning. He’s _outside_.

Not the real _outside_ , the deadly wasteland that’d kill him stone dead soon as he set foot in it without a cleaning suit on. But it isn’t the beautiful lie, either. It’s like Dean’s brain has somehow synthesised the two, come up with something that looks a little like the photographs that take up the stiff, glossy middle pages of the Legacy, but that still doesn’t seem a hundred percent real.

They’re lying in the grass, side by side, under the shade of a tree. It’s warm, and a bird twitters somewhere up in the canopy of leaves. The sky is different from the one in the simulation. It isn’t just some uniform sheet of bright blue. It’s so wide he can’t see the end of it, and it changes constantly, and the clouds that are just vague smudges through a silo viewscreen have turned into these huge, towering things that look like if they toppled down from the heavens, they’d crush everything beneath them. They aren’t ever still. Dean finds himself seeing pictures in them. A man falling. A woman reaching out her hand toward him. A great bird with its wings spread, though Dean can’t tell whether in welcome or in threat.

Cas’s hand on his shoulder brings him out of his reverie. An easy, casual touch, so different to the tenuous sort-of-friendship they’ve developed in the silo that Dean feels a physical ache at it, can’t help but reach up and trap Cas’s hand between both of his own and pull him down and kiss him.

And Cas just goes with it, still easy, sinking down so that they’re lying face-to face, working open the buttons of Dean’s coverall and pushing warm hands up under his t-shirt. It feels like they’ve done this a hundred times before, and it’s the most obvious thing in the world to return the favour, to press his lips to the pulse in Cas’s throat and grind up against him, legs sliding together, bodies pressed close, heat building in the space between them, every point of contact a spark like a tiny star.

It’s so easy to get lost in it, to close his eyes and just feel, so that’s what Dean does. It's been so damn long since anything was this easy. It’s a little like being drunk, when things you wouldn’t normally say or do—things you’d keep locked down tight—seem obvious, simple. Only there’s none of the wrongness or the dislocation that come with being wasted; no nagging suggestion that there are regrets in his near future. He’s right here with Cas, feeling the rasp of his stubble, feeling him breathe.

A voice in the distance breaks the spell.

 _Dean_ , it says, and Dean goes still, his eyes opening.

_Dean, can you hear me?_

It’s Sam’s voice. Quiet but urgent, getting closer and then going quiet, like a radio fading in and out.

They’ve both gone still, now, and Dean scrambles up into a sitting position, Cas watching him with big, concerned eyes.

“Sam?” Dean calls out. “Sammy? Yeah, I hear you, where are you?”

 _Dean…_ Sam’s voice says again, and drifts off into nothingness.

Dean is on his feet, then, turning and turning where he stands, crashing through the trees and yelling himself hoarse to no reply. The sky darkens; the wind rises. The twittering of the birds reaches a crescendo and then falls abruptly silent.

Cas catches him by the arm, holds him still. “Dean,” he’s saying. “Dean, stop, think.”

Dean shakes his head in desperation. “I can’t,” he says. “I _can’t_.”

The wind roars, shaking the trees and stealing the breath out of his lungs, and there’s a sound like someone shaking a rattle. Apples rain down around them. He can’t hear Sam.

“Dean,” Cas repeats, but this time it’s in his ear, up close. “Dean. Wake up.”

He sits upright with a start, blinking sleep out of bleary eyes.

He’s on his bedroll in the storage locker. Radio static hisses behind him, and Cas is crouching over him. The worried set of his face, the intensity of his eyes, are close enough to the look on his face in Dean’s dream that it feels like a slap.

“Are you all right?” Cas asks him.

“Mmf,” Dean answers, scrubbing at his eyes. Then it occurs to him to nod. Cas keeps staring at him, so he adds, “’M fine,” and attempts a grin.

It’s weak—it feels weak, anyway—but Cas’s expression softens, and he shifts the heavy Legacy volume out the way so he can sit beside Dean. An expression of vague distaste crosses his face, and as Dean takes the book from him, he realises he’s drooled all over an explanation of the superiority of capitalist democracy.

He wipes it off as best he can on his sleeve and closes the book. If the Ancients didn’t want people falling asleep on their precious histories, they should’ve made them a little more readable. Stuck a few jokes in there.

“Were you having a nightmare?” Cas asks him.

It’d be easy enough to say yes, mutter something vague about bad memories, and leave it at that. Cas wouldn’t push him on it.

But—maybe it’s the way Cas has of looking at him, like he can see right through all the bullshit, down to the fear at his core; or maybe it’s just that Dean did enough hiding for one goddamn lifetime back in his own silo—he has this dumb-as-shit urge to not lie to the guy.

“Uh,” he says. “Not exactly?”

“You sounded distressed.” The crease between Cas’s eyebrows is back. “What were you dreaming about?”

Dean stiffens. No way is he telling Cas about the almost-sex-dream. Which, kind of a surprise in itself. Sure, he’s noticed Cas. His eyes that look right down into the center of you, his mouth that always seems to be paused somewhere between a scowl and a kiss. His wiry strength and careful hands, and his _voice_ , Jesus. Under other circumstances, Dean would’ve hit on him so fast they’d both have concussions. Seriously hit on him, he means; not the flirting-as-default-setting that made his early days here so damn awkward. But he hasn’t actually _felt the urge_ in—well, since before Dad was sent to cleaning, at least. Which is seriously weird, for Dean; last time he had a dry spell, before Lisa, he got worried that he’d given himself RSI in his right wrist. But he’s barely even noticed until now, too preoccupied with other things and too dead tired to really care.

Cas doesn’t need to know about any of that. Plus, there are still things Dean should be preoccupied with. Things that are way more important.

“I thought I heard Sam,” he says, quietly. “Talking to me. Like he was—looking for me, I guess? But I couldn’t find him.”

Cas’s eyes flick toward the still-hissing radio. “Do you think—”

Dean shrugs. “I don’t know, man,” he says. “I really don’t know.”

They sit there, listening to the static in silence, until Cas has to get up and sneak back to his bunk. Dean listens for a long time afterwards, but the airwaves remain resolutely Sam-free.

 

 

 

 

Cas brings him a new volume of the Legacy a couple days later, when he’s done with the first one.

It got more interesting as it went. In places anyway. In others, reading it was about as much fun as bashing his head against a brick wall.

The rest of the Legacy, according to Cas, takes a different format. There are entries on a whole bunch of different things, aspects of life in the Ancients’ world. It’s an _encyclopaedia_ , Cas tells him, spelling the word out carefully and not laughing when Dean just looks at him and says, “A what now?”

Dean gives it a desultory flick-through to the accompanying hiss of the radio, not really able to summon up much enthusiasm for _agriculture_ or _Ancient Greece_.

Then, he finds the chapter on _automobiles_.

The pictures are what sucker him in first. The models from the last couple centuries before the silos were built are good-looking, in their own way; powered by electricity, all clean, sinuous lines and bright colours. But it’s the antiques that really draw his eye.

There’s a picture of a gleaming black-and-chrome behemoth, proud owner standing over her with a polishing cloth in hand, and Dean figures, yeah, he’d rather that than user-friendly. The older-style autos, you had to know what you were doing. That’s why they got phased out. Getting to know a machine, though—figuring out what made it tick so he could keep it ticking, know when something was wrong from the slightest change in the tone of a vibration, go home happy at the end of the day, knowing something was still working because of him—that was a big part of what Dean loved about his job back in Mechanical. He still misses it now, not having anything useful to do with his hands. More than that, though, he misses the security of knowing what his job _was_ , and knowing he was really fucking good at it.

He probably won’t ever have that again. It’s an unexpected, new kind of melancholy that hits him at the idea.

And here he thought he’d already gotten through all the available types of misery.

Dean turns the page and buries himself in diagrams of combustion engines and electric power systems, letting his visual imagination kick in and take over. He studies them like he’s really gonna have to work with them someday, and fiercely ignores the ache that’s made a home in his chest.

 

 

 

 

Apparently he doesn’t do an awesome job of that, because the first thing Cas does when he shows up the next morning is tilt his head sideways at Dean and announce, “You’re troubled.”

Dean snorts, lifting his head and closing the book. “That’s, uh. That’s tactful of you. Thanks.”

Cas ignores his crappy attempt at deflection. “Can I help?” he asks, planting himself on the bedroll next to Dean.

Dean shakes his head. “Not unless you got a time machine stashed away somewhere in this silo of yours,” he says. “Or you learned to teleport sometime in the last twelve hours.”

Cas doesn’t smile. Honestly, if Dean hadn’t heard Cas make a joke once in a while with his own ears, he’d swear the guy had had his sense of humor removed at birth. Times like this, though, he suspects that Cas just doesn’t have time for jokes when they’re part of the bullshit (and most everything Dean says is part of the bullshit).

Dean can respect that, even if it isn’t his MO, but sometimes it makes him feel like he’s under a microscope.

“You’re homesick,” Cas says, gravely.

“Yeah, no shit,” Dean shoots back, and then feels like kind of a dickwad—more so because Cas doesn’t take offence, just sits there looking at him with those sorrowful baby-blues.

“I wish I could help,” is all he says, and Dean sighs, sagging into Cas’s side to lean on him.

“Yeah,” he says, quietly. “Me too.” He pauses. “It’s just—I know it was shitty, I know we were all being lied to, I know it killed half my family. But it ain’t like I’m ever gonna have another home.”

Cas leans back into him silently, the gentle press of his shoulder more real, more honest, than any attempt at reassurance he could come out with.

“But I could be okay with that if I just knew what the fuck was happening over there,” Dean goes on. “I mean, it sucks, being cut off. It really, really sucks. But if I just knew everybody was okay—” He breaks off, a treacherous tremble in his voice threatening to turn into a full-on display of pathetic-asshole-ness. He swallows. “But I don’t. I’m stuck here, and all my friends are over there, and for all I know they could be dead.” He says it again, because it feels like it needs it: “They could be dead.”

A moment’s hesitation, and then Cas says, “Your silo hasn’t gone dark.”

Dean looks at him.

“When things go badly wrong—they always go dark. That’s how it’s been for as long as my family has been listening.” Cas looks him in the eyes. “I wouldn’t keep that from you. I would have no wish to bring you painful news, but—you’ve been lied to for so long. You deserve the truth.”

Dean actually hasn’t thought of that, before now—that Cas might hide the truth. Cas is right—he’s been lied to his whole damn life. He should expect it by now; it’s been the default mode of his existence all this time. But somehow, since he’s been here, it hasn’t even occurred to him not to trust Cas.

He wonders what that says.

Instead of voicing the thought, he gives Cas his best attempt at a smile. “Thanks, man,” he says. “Appreciate it.”

Cas nods. “And, Dean?” he says. “Not _all_ your friends.”

“Huh?”

“Not all your friends are back in your old silo. At least, I hope not.” He looks so serious, and it’s so damn artless that it makes Dean’s chest ache again, and he can’t even begin to think what the right thing to say to that is, so he doesn’t even try.

He crumples up a protein bar wrapper that’s lying at his feet, tosses it at Cas, and says, “Yeah, man, now do we braid each other’s hair before or after the cookies and boy talk?” He sticks a grin on the end of it and hopes that’s enough to let Cas know he doesn’t mean any malice.

Apparently it works, because Cas just shakes his head and says, “Sometimes I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Dean grins. “Yeah, well. I’m a man of mystery.”

Cas actually snorts at that, so Dean shoves him, and Cas shoves back, and it looks like both their inner twelve-year-olds have been looking for an excuse to come out and play, because the whole thing devolves into more wrapper throwing and more shoving, until Dean shoves a little too hard and Cas ends up on his back on the bedroll with a soft _oof_ , Dean leaning over him, his heart suddenly racing.

He can see the pulse hammering in Cas’s neck. And Cas’s eyes are dark and his lips are parted and he’s looking at Dean’s mouth, and fucking Christ, it’d be so easy to just lean down and close the distance between them and kiss him—

And then Cas would give him a bloody nose and bolt, probably, because even if all the signs point to, _yeah, he wants me_ , that ain’t enough to undo a lifetime of shitty conditioning.

Dean sits up, biting back his sigh, and offers his hand to help Cas heave himself into a sitting position. He isn’t smiling anymore. Neither is Cas.

In fact, Cas has got his serious face back on, and Dean’s heart feels like it's falling down a flight of stairs when he opens his mouth to speak.

“Dean,” he says, sombre. “I—I know my silo probably seems a little—”

“Bugfuck crazy?” Dean offers helpfully, willing his heart to stop racing.

“That’s a colourful way of putting it,” Cas says, but he doesn’t disagree. “I mean—it isn’t your home. I can’t change that. But if by some miracle you ever were to find a way back—I would miss you.” He ducks his head. “I wanted you to know that.”

“Huh.” Dean’s mouth has gone dry, and for once, he finds himself all out of bullshit. He coughs. “Uh, thanks, Cas,” he manages. “For what it’s worth, you too.” He pauses, then, grins over at Cas. “Hey, if you weren’t around, I’d have to get my own dinner. Ain’t ever getting used to that again.”

Cas smiles back at him. It’s a faint echo of Dean’s grin, but it’s real enough.

 

 

 

 

It happens two days later, in the small hours, long enough after Cas has left him for Dean to be mostly-distracted by an entry in the Legacy about _baseball_ , which was apparently a huge deal to some of the Ancients. It’s still a little brain-melting, the thought of having all that uninterrupted space just to play a game in. The games they played as kids in the silo mostly involved racing up and down the stairs or climbing on the railing—and man, did those stop being fun once Sammy got his growth spurt and developed pipe-cleaner legs. There wasn’t room to throw balls or run for miles on the flat.

Dean’s getting used to the idea, though, or anyhow getting used to accepting that he can’t really wrap his brain around it.

He mostly leaves the radio on while he reads, and the hiss of it has become part of his permanent background noise. Dean keeps it quiet enough that he can still hear footsteps, out in the storage room or in the corridor, but he’s gotten used to it. Honestly, he’s starting to feel uncomfortable with total silence, with the way it reminds him of how alone he is, hidden away in this strange silo, clinging to a snatched couple minutes’ conversation with Cas—maybe half an hour if they’re lucky—twice a day for human contact.

He basically forgets that it’s there most of the time, and so when he hears a hushed, _Dean?_ thready and faint through the static, he freezes where he’s sitting.

It’s Sam’s voice. Sam, sounding the way he did in Dean’s dream, distant and anxious.

Maybe Dean’s dreaming again. He pinches himself hard on the leg to make sure, shakes his head to clear it.

_Dean? Look, if you’re out there—please answer me. Please._

A pause, and what sounds like an actual sniffle.

_I know. I know it’s too late. I’m talking to a ghost—maybe this place has actually made me crazy. Just, please. Please don’t be dead._

Dean just sits there in silence for a moment, staring at the radio. His mouth works but no words come out. Then it occurs to him to flip the switch to open the channel.

“Sammy?” he tries to say, but it barely comes out, his voice dried to a papery scratch. He swallows. “Sam,” he tries again. “Sam. Can you hear me?”

 _Dean?_ It’s faint, but there. Wondering. A pause. And then, certain, _I’m dreaming._

Dean feels like maybe _he_ is. Hard to imagine, after so long with nothing but crap happening all around him, that this is the reality; that maybe the sound of Sam’s voice pledging its loyalty to the fuckers in Silo One was the nightmare.

His voice is shaky, when he manages to get words out. “No way. You ain’t getting rid of me that easy.”

 _Dean? It’s really you?_ A rush of breath that makes the radio crackle with static. _It’s really you. I’ve been—I thought you were dead, Dean. I don’t get much time on my own, but—I’ve been trying. Ever since Ruby told me. I’ve been trying._

The mention of Ruby’s name sobers Dean abruptly. “Yeah,” he says, and caution steadies the tremor in his voice. “About that.”

Sam stops, mid-flow of words, goes quiet.

“What’s going on, Sammy?”

 _It’s complicated_ — Sam starts to explain, and Dean cuts him off, the old, familiar twist of apprehension in his gut making itself felt.

“I heard you,” Dean says. “Talking to Silo One. Making some kind of a deal with them. I _heard_ you. Don’t lie to me.”

A gusty sigh. _I’m not lying, Dean. It_ is _complicated._

Dean can picture the tight-lipped expression on Sam’s face without needing to see it. He shrugs, crosses his arms, then wonders if Sam can picture that, too.

“I got time,” he says. “ _Un_ complicate it for me.”

_I don’t know much time I’ve got here, but—_

“Sam.”

_Okay, okay. I’ll give it a shot. First thing I want you to know, though—I never sold you out._

Dean frowns. “I never thought you did.”

_You sure about that?_

He can feel a protest rising in his throat, but he doesn’t have time to fight about it, not now. Not if Ruby might show up and cut off Sam’s end of the conversation any moment. So all he says is, “Yeah, Sammy, I’m sure. C’mon, let’s hear the rest of it.”

 _Fine_. Sam sighs again. _I never sold you out. Or Jess_. He pauses, then admits, _I haven’t heard from her since I ended up here. Ruby says she’s alive, but—that’s all I know. I hope she’s okay._

He sounds so genuinely devastated that Dean can’t stay mad. His suspicions start to quiet. Whatever's going on here, that’s still his little brother out there, hurting.

“She’s a smart chick,” he says. “She’ll be fine.” It’s as much reassurance as he can offer. Who knows what’s happened in the rest of the silo since he’s been gone?

 _I hope so_ , Sam says, and Dean hears the things he’s not saying as clear as if they were spoken out loud.

Mom was smart. Dad was smart. Didn’t help them any.

“Yeah,” Dean says, “Me too.” He pauses. “So tell me. If you ain’t switched teams, what the hell is going on over there?”

 _Ruby caught me sneaking around in the cleaning suit workshop_ , Sam begins, after a moment’s silence. _She’d seen Dad’s files—IT took everything in his desk when—_ He breaks off; picks up again. _She knew what Dad thought, what I’d been looking for, how lost we were when we realised he’d been wrong—and when she found me in there, she laughed. Laughed her damn head off. And then she said she could show me the truth._

Dean snorts. “Yeah, because nobody ever introduced a ton of bullshit by saying that before.”

_Just listen to me, will you?_

“Okay, okay.”

 _She could show me the truth, train me up as her deputy, and I could swear to keep the secret from everybody. Or I could go to cleaning. She had all the evidence, and if you’d refused to send me, you would’ve been next out the airlock_. A pause, and in his mind’s eye Dean sees Sam’s shrug, the resigned slump of his shoulders when he’s defeated. _Didn’t seem like much of a choice._

“What, so she locked you away in that server room and you’re still in there?” Shit. And Dean’s been feeling like _he’s_ on his own over here.

_Pretty much. She was supposed to let me go back to my normal duties, after I’d been sworn in, but she keeps saying I need a couple more days to familiarise myself with the equipment._

Sam sounds dubious, and Dean raises an eyebrow. “So she’s still hiding something from you?”

_I guess so._

“Something worse than the fact she tried to have me killed?”

_Maybe not worse. But maybe something I might be able to do something about._

There’s exhaustion in Sam’s voice, though; the same kind of hopelessness Dean felt after the cafeteria bomb, locked in the cells.

“Hey, no need to sound so down in the mouth,” he says, with a cheerfulness he doesn’t really feel. “I’m still kicking. That’s gotta count for something, right?”

 _Yeah_ , Sam says. _Yeah, it’s more than something._

Dean still has a list of questions as long as his arm, and he’s about to get started on a couple more of them when Sam goes on.

_So, tell me about that. I mean—I figured you might have managed to sneak a radio or something out, and I knew your theory about the cleaning suits, so when I heard you’d gotten out of sight of the viewscreen I figured—maybe you could’ve made it out there, for a little while, anyway. But when I tried talking to you and got no reply…_

He trails off, and Dean doesn’t need him to finish. “Sorry, Sammy.”

Sam’s voice is brighter when he speaks again. _I know there are other silos. That’s—you managed to find one of them, right? How’d you get in?_

Dean clears his throat. He’s just near enough torn Sam a new one for throwing his lot in with Ruby to find out the truth. He has a feeling Sam won’t be too happy to hear that Dean was keeping his own secret source of information from them the whole time.

Besides which, something in him rebels at the thought of sharing Cas, even with his brother. It’s dumb, irrational, but aside from a couple basic possessions, Cas is all he has these days.

Still. Sam deserves the truth. They’ve both been lied to enough for one lifetime.

“Actually,” he begins, “that’s, uh, kinda complicated too.”

He’s saved from having to continue by a sudden silence on Sam’s end of the connection, and a hiss of, _Gotta go. I’ll be in touch. And then you’re gonna tell me everything._

The connection cuts out abruptly, and Dean’s left cradling the radio in his hands, wishing he had some proof that what he just heard was real.

But a heaviness that’s hung on him for weeks has lifted off his shoulders, and he can’t suppress a grin.

Sam’s alive. He’s okay. Ruby’s got him on lockdown, but she hasn’t managed to brainwash him, not just yet. It’s the best day Dean’s had in a long time.

 

 

 

 

It must show on his face, because when Cas shows up a couple hours later, his eyes widen and he asks, “Dean? What’s happened?” with an undercurrent of nervous hope in the rumble of his voice.

Man, this is getting be a habit. At least Dean has better news this time.

He jerks his head in the direction of the radio. “It’s Sam,” he says.

“You heard from him?”

“Yeah.” He can’t stop grinning. Why should he? Isn’t like good news is a thing he can take for granted. “He’s alive. He’s okay. They haven’t gotten to him, not like I thought.”

“Dean.” Cas sits down next to him, crowded up close into his space, which any other day would make Dean twitchy and distracted, but right now he doesn’t have it in him to care. “That’s—” He breaks off, apparently searching for a suitably enthusiastic word.

“Awesome?” Dean suggests.

“Yes. _Awesome_ sounds right.” Cas deposits his pack, hopefully containing food and a fresh razor, though no new Legacy volume today, at their feet. He doesn’t take his eyes off Dean’s face. There’s something open, wondering, in the way he’s looking at Dean, and he tilts his head curiously and says, “I’ve never seen you happy before.”

 _Well, no shit_ , is on the tip of Dean’s tongue, but never makes it out of his mouth, because Cas’s eyes are still bright and curious, and then Cas is reaching up to brush his cheek with a gentle hand, fingertips catching on the stubble at his jaw. They’re so close that they’re breathing each other’s air. And then—then, halle-fucking-lujah, Cas is leaning in and kissing him.

It’s soft—chaste, even—an undemanding press of lips to lips, Cas’s hand curling around the back of his neck, a faint tremor in his touch. But it’s enough to set Dean’s heart racing, enough that he wants to punch the air and shout, _Fuck yeah!_ from the top of the staircase.

If he’d known flashing a grin was all it would take, he would’ve faked a good mood ages ago.

But really, he knows it’s more than that. Cas can see through him, can see when he really means what he’s saying, and Cas actually gives a crap about him. And fuck if that doesn’t make him happy, if it isn’t worth more than a dozen kisses.

Instinctively, he leans into Cas, parting his lips, wrapping an arm around his waist to pull him closer, to hold him and not let go.

That’s what brings it all tumbling down.

Abruptly, Cas goes still. Dean pulls back a little to look him in the face. He’s breathing hard, and he looks startled. His hands are on Dean’s shoulders, but they hold him at arms’ length.

“Dean,” he starts, voice ragged. “Dean—I—I’m sorry—”

He’s on his feet then, and he runs for the exit like his legs can’t get him out of there fast enough.


	14. Chapter 14

 

Dean sighs and flops back onto his bedroll, thumping his head against the makeshift pillow once more for good measure.

For all his relief at knowing Sam’s okay—for a relative value of ‘okay’, anyway—his good mood is gone. He lies there shifting uncomfortably, an itch beneath his skin that he can’t get rid of. He can’t summon up the concentration to read, and he can’t get the memory of Cas looking at him like he was some amazing thing—of Cas _kissing_ him—out of his mind.

It’d be a nice memory, he thinks, if Cas hadn’t had to go screw it up like that.

Then he feels like an asshole again, because, much as he’d like to blame the whole thing on Cas and be done with it, he doesn’t have to look far to figure out what the guy’s problem is.

Cas has grown up surrounded by all these dumb-ass taboos around sex and relationships, right? Far as he’s concerned, sex is something you’re only supposed to do with the person you’re married to—and doing it out of wedlock is a big enough sin that it’d damn well better be true love. Dean, on the other hand—well, he got here and started with the flirting as soon as he’d adjusted to his surroundings. It’s a default setting as much as it’s a serious attempt at getting laid. Still, Cas probably thinks he does that to everyone who catches his eye and jumps into bed with as many of them as possible—and, well, he wouldn’t be wrong. But.

Dean’s always figured sex is about the most fun two people can have for free (or three people, or four people—he sure isn’t judging), and anyone who’d make a sin or a sacrament out of it is screwed in the head, best stayed away from.

But Cas—he’d try to understand, for Cas. It isn’t just that he wants Cas to want him. It’s that he doesn’t want to be something Cas regrets.

This whole thing is different. Like, he’d always thought what he had with Lisa was pretty much the perfect relationship. They were good friends, they had a lot of really good sex, her kid was fun to hang out with, and they fit around each other’s lives in a way that just worked. It was easy. When she broke it off with him, though, he was fine, and he’d always known he would be. He’d always known that was the way it was gonna go, eventually. People get sick of Dean’s shit, and they leave, and he doesn’t blame them. He always goes in expecting it. He doesn’t get too invested; he protects himself.

Cas, though.

Dean is fine with them being just friends. He truly is, if that’s all Cas wants from him. But having the possibility of more hanging in front of them and not even giving it a try—because of fear, because of shame, because one day Cas might get married off to some chick he doesn’t feel anything for? That seems like the real sin.

Eventually, Dean gets up. He pads to the bathroom, brushes his teeth and splashes cold water on his face, sheds his coverall and folds it up under his pillow, turns out his flashlight and curls up in his bedroll to sleep.

Sleep doesn’t come.

Neither does Cas.

Dean gives up on trying to sleep as morning creeps into afternoon, feeling stale and used-up with turning the whole thing over and over inside his head. He takes a tepid shower, charges the batteries in the radio, flicks through pages of the Legacy volume, his eyes roving restlessly over the page without taking anything in.

Most evenings, Cas shows up a little while before the start of his shift. Today the hour comes and passes without any sign of him.

That’s fine. Dean has food stashed away in one of the other storage lockers, and he gnaws on a couple tasteless nutrient bars for dinner, hunched over the Legacy and telling himself that everything’s fine, Cas probably just got cornered by one of his ‘brothers’ and couldn’t get away.

Everything’s fine. Cas hasn’t been found out. No bunch of fanatics is about to march down the stairs, drag Dean out of his hidey-hole and throw him in another cell, or worse.

Everything’s fine, Cas doesn’t hate him.

Dean isn’t sure which one of those things worries him more.

 

 

 

 

Cas doesn’t make his appearance the next morning, either, and eventually Dean stops pretending not to worry. Not just because he’s getting sick of protein bars and he wouldn’t exactly know where to start with the food-stealing if he did suddenly have to fend for himself around here.

Not just because _what-if-something-happened-to-him_ , even, because that isn’t a new thing. It’s a constant throb of worry in some part of his brain, one of the permanent background noises of his existence, even if it is turned up a notch now—but if they’d gotten to Cas before last night, somebody would’ve come looking by now. Dean isn’t that far from the inhabited levels; Cas wouldn’t be able to sneak down to him as often as he does if he was hidden away deeper in the silo. He would’ve heard something.

No: it’s because, what if that’s it? What if Cas just doesn’t come back, because he’s too freaked out, because the kiss was a mistake and he never really wanted it, because _Dean_ was a mistake?

His brain conjures up nightmare scenarios without his say-so. Endless days of hiding in the dark places of the silo like a rat, scavenging for scraps, starved of human contact until his voice dries up in his throat and the dark and the silence choke him.

He pushes them away. Can’t really believe them, because Cas may be freaking out like a sonofabitch, but he’s _good_. He gives a crap—in general, but also about Dean, in a way Dean finds it hard to wrap his head around. Cas wouldn’t just ditch him like that.

But there are other nightmares, less in-your-face-dramatic ones. Ones where Cas shows up, bearing food and soap and clean clothes, and nothing else. Doesn’t stay to talk, doesn’t look Dean in the eyes, and as the days wear on the silence turns solid between them and resentment settles into the lines of their faces. Dean thinks that might actually be worse, because he can get halfway to believing it.

The buzz of anxiety that’s been his background noise until now gets louder, harder to ignore. Thinking about Sam—listening to the radio, hoping desperately for his voice—makes him sick with it. Thinking about Cas has been a welcome distraction, before now, even if Dean figured nothing was actually gonna happen on that front. Fantasy—that’s safe. Now they’ve crossed the line into reality, he doesn’t have that anymore. Just another source of worry, another ache in his gut.

Reality’s always a goddamn disappointment. He doesn’t know why he thought this would be any different.

He can’t even settle down to read, and he ends up feeling restless and scattered. He pulls all his possessions into a heap in the middle of the storage locker and rearranges them, turning his bedroll so that he can lay down with his head at the opposite end, so that when he tries to sleep he won’t turn over and imagine Cas’s head on the pillow next to him, his bright eyes and that sudden smile.

It doesn’t take long. Isn’t like he has enough stuff down here to make reorganising a mammoth task. Dean gives up trying not to think about it, in the end; just sits down in the middle of the bedroll with his knees hunched up in front of him and rests his head on them and closes his eyes.

The radio crackles into life.

He opens his eyes again.

Another crackle. And then, _Dean? You hearing me?_

Dean uncurls himself. “Sam? Yeah, I read you.”

_Good. That’s good._

Despite himself, Dean smiles. “Yeah.” Then, because he can’t resist, “Man, you got a funny idea of ‘soon’.”

 _I have to be careful, Dean, you know that_. But the snippiness in Sam’s voice only lasts a moment. _Listen—I got out of here yesterday. Ruby’s still keeping me around for training in the evenings, but I did a normal day’s work. And I got to go back to my quarters._

“You see Jess?”

A pause, and then, _No_.

“Fuck. Fuck, man, I’m sorry.”

 _Don’t—don’t talk like—_ Sam breaks off, takes a minute to compose himself, and his voice is steadier when it comes out the radio again. _All her stuff was gone. If somebody took her, like—like they took Mom—then she wouldn’t have had time to pack up, right? Maybe she took off. Maybe someone’s helping her hide._

“You think anyone’d have the stones to do that under the new regime? Between Ruby and that Walker guy—iron fist in an iron glove, man.”

 _Yeah, I don’t think he’s popular_ , Sam says. _I only spoke to a couple people. IT people. There’s this girl, Charlie, one of the shadows—she and Jess got kind of friendly._

Dean nods. “Yeah, I think I met her. Redhead, so cheerful it gives you a headache?”

 _That’s Charlie. She hasn’t heard from her, but—she seemed_ relieved, _when I asked her what was going on in the silo. Like she’d been waiting to talk to someone._

“Okay, so what is going on over there? Arrests in the night, same old nightmare with your caster calling the shots, what?”

_Not exactly. Or, well yeah, but—from what Charlie said? I don’t think it’s running as smoothly as Ruby meant for it to._

“No?” Dean feels a moment’s grim satisfaction, at that, but it dies the moment he remembers what that probably means. More fighting. More unrest. More people’s livelihoods getting trashed, like Pam’s did. More cleanings.

 _No_. Sam’s voice is grim. _There’s no Mayor, right now—Ruby’s running the place, shuttling back and forth between here and Ell—the Mayor’s office. The people she has working for her are all loyalists, though I figure most of them don’t know the full story. Tammi, a couple of others. And Walker’s a hardass. He’s been recruiting, encouraging people to turn in their neighbours, sending out visible patrols and having the security stations lower down do the same. It’s all pretty heavy-handed._

No shit. Dean’s stomach twists. He can’t imagine Jody, or sweet little Nancy, or puppyish Garth, going along with that kind of thing. What’s the bet Walker’s been ‘recruiting’ their replacements? “Your friend hear anything about the other guys in the Sheriff’s office?” he asks. “If they’re still working there?”

 _Sorry_ , Sam says. _I don’t know._

Dean figured as much. He tries to ignore the hollow feeling in his gut. “’S okay,” he says, then clears his throat. “So, what, Ruby and friends are kicking and the silo’s kicking back?”

_Kinda? I mean, there haven’t been any more attacks since—_

“Since everybody thinks I’m toast?”

 _Yeah. And I still think the whole thing was a setup_. Sam pauses. _Actually, I’m positive. The woman who blew herself up in the canteen? Her name was Lilith something—actually, that’s why I didn’t figure it out right away, they had different last names. But she was Ruby’s sister._

Dean sucks in a breath. “Real family business, huh?” He shakes his head. “She let her own sister off herself to get rid of the opposition? That’s—man, I don’t even know what that is.”

 _Yeah_ , Sam says. _That’s why—well, I can’t rely on the fact that she likes me or whatever to keep me safe. The system comes first—over everything_. He pauses. _Anyway, point is, the whole underground network thing was a setup. But I guess people who aren’t happy with the crackdowns, the way Ruby’s running things—they might have gotten ideas from it?_

Dean feels sick. “What, more people being murdered in Dad’s name? _That’s_ the glorious resistance? Fuck that, Sammy.”

_No, nothing like that. No violence. Not yet anyway. But you know the way things were starting to get. Rivalries between the levels kicking off again, everyone screaming that somebody else is getting more than them. People dividing into factions. A big section in the mids is barricaded off, and last week the porters threatened to strike._

“Well, that’s just great for Ruby, ain’t it? Divide and conquer?”

_Maybe? But I don’t know, Dean. People don’t exactly trust Security these days, from the sound of things, and IT isn’t popular either. It could turn on her._

“Damn well hope it does.”

_I’m not so sure._

Dean blinks, a tiny thread of fear growing inside him. “What do you mean, Sam?” he asks, a warning edge in his voice.

_Without an organised resistance—without the numbers? She still has control of things up here. All she has to do is put in a call to Silo One._

Neither of them speak for a moment, Dean recalling the things Cas said to him about _going dark_ , Sam letting the chilling implication of his words sink in.

“She did that, she’d be as dead as everybody else,” Dean points out. “You really think she’s that crazy?”

_I think she’s that convinced it’s the right thing to do, yeah._

“The right thing to do? People have _died_. What the fuck is right about any of this?”

 _Hey, you don’t need to preach to me_ , Sam says. Softly, and Dean remembers that Sam doesn’t even know if his girlfriend’s alive right now, and feels a pang of guilt. Sam sighs, then. _It’s just—_

He breaks off.

“Just what?” Dean prods.

_It’s nothing. You wouldn’t—_

“I wouldn’t understand, that it?” Dean snaps.

_Well, you aren’t exactly giving me much reason to think you would right now._

Dean sighs, rubbing at the back of his neck, trying to tamp down on the anger that wants to surge up and out of his mouth in a bitter torrent. Sam doesn’t deserve it. He isn’t even sure who does, really. Ruby and Co, probably, but he knows it isn’t just about this. “Sorry, man,” he says. “I just—if you got something to say, you can say it. Ain’t like I can kick your ass right now.”

It’s a weak-ass attempt at humour, but Sam’s soft huff of a laugh tells Dean he’s forgiven.

The humour doesn’t last.

 _We tried to do the right thing, too_ , Sam says. _Find the truth, uncover all the corruption. And people died._

“Sam—”

Sam’s defeated sigh cuts him off. _I’m just not sure there even is a right thing to do_ , he says, finally. _Not anymore._

He sounds so damn sad, so tired, and the worst of it is, Dean can’t pretend there isn’t a ring of truth to the statement. Not like he hasn’t had the thought himself. If Ellen hadn’t brought him to the up tops, let him go snooping around in Dad’s footsteps, she’d still be alive, and so would all those other people. Sam’s gotta be feeling the same way, asking himself whether Jess would still be safe at home if he hadn’t gone prying, hadn’t gotten her involved.

Funny enough, it’s that which strengthens him. If Sam’s blaming himself, feeling like crap, then Dean can just nut up and be his big brother, even if he does have to do it long distance.

“Yeah, well,” he says, “Doing nothing wasn’t an option. Still ain’t. So we suck it up, and we keep trying until we find the right thing. Got it?”

 _Who’s ‘we’?_ Sam grouses. _You’re not even here._

That’s good, the protest in his voice. When Sam really has decided something’s hopeless, he gives up and shuts up.

“Yeah, well,” Dean says. “I’m your long-distance consultant, or whatever.”

But Sam’s found something new to latch onto, now. _Speaking of which_ , he says. _You never did tell me where you are. Or how you ended up there. I think it’s about time you did._

“I don’t,” Dean complains, but Sam sounds so relieved at the change of subject he doesn’t have the heart to stonewall him any longer.

Besides which, he’s gonna have to spill it all sometime. He’s gonna have to talk about Cas, gonna have to face Sam’s anger at not being told all this time. Might as well get all the pain out the way in one go.

He takes a deep breath. “Okay,” he says. “But first you gotta promise not to give me that pissy face of yours. ‘Cause I’ll know.”

 _You gonna give me a reason to be pissed?_ Sam asks, an edge in his voice.

Dean sighs. “Yeah, probably,” he admits.

A moment’s quiet. Then Sam throws back at him, _Well, it’s not like I can kick your ass from here either. Just tell me._

Dean squeezes his eyes shut and scrubs a hand over them. “It started when Dad died. Bobby had these old radios in his workshop. He’d been screwing around with them, taking them apart and putting the usable stuff back together, messing with the channels to see if we could get them working longer-range—like, between Mechanical and the up tops, maybe. I thought it was kind of a dumb idea. Well, mostly I thought there was no point, because you didn’t wanna talk to me anyway.”

_Dean—_

“I know, Sammy. Ixnay on the emotional scenes, man.”

_Okay. Just as long as you do. Know, I mean._

“Yeah,” Dean says, quietly. “Anyway, like I said, I thought it was a dumb idea, but I needed the distraction, so I started helping him out with it anyway. I took one of them to the up tops with me, when Dad was sent to cleaning. Thought at least it’d give me something to do with my hands. I was messing with it one night, and—” He pauses, takes a breath. “And I heard a voice.”

 

 

 

 

Sam takes it surprisingly well, in the end. He doesn’t exactly sound happy that Dean kept this stuff from him—which, sure, Dean gets that. But he seems to understand. The paranoia; the way that Dean wasn’t always sure Cas was a real person and not some trick set up by IT; the fear that nobody would believe the truth even if he did come out and say it.

More than that, though. _I get it, you know_ , Sam says, when he’s done. _When you feel like you’re being watched all the time. You want something that’s just your own._

“Yeah,” Dean says, too surprised to snap back with a dismissive response. Though the next thing his brain comes up with is a barbed reminder that no, Cas isn’t his own, not even close.

It occurs to him then—and wow, is he a douche for not thinking of that first— _why_ it is that Sam gets it. Locked in that room, only Ruby to talk to, and yeah, she was probably trying to burrow her way under his skin the whole damn time.

“Sam?” he asks—cautious, because this is perilously close to a whole talking-about-their-feelings session, and he doesn’t have the energy or the presence of mind to cross that kind of minefield right now. “What was your thing? Your just-your-own thing?”

 _Ruby asked me about a lot of stuff_ , Sam says, slowly. _She really wanted to know everything about me, I guess. She asked me how I met Jess, how we first got together—and I told her everything. I guess I didn’t want her thinking Jess had anything to hide._

The bitterness in his voice is unmistakable. Dean winces in sympathy.

 _She asked me about Mom and Dad. I told her about them, too. Well, Mom, not so much. But the way Dad was after she died, the obsession, the drinking—I spilled it all._ Sam hesitates. _And then she started asking about you. And I couldn’t. It wasn’t just that she might find something to use against you—though it was that, kind of. I just. Our childhood_ sucked, _Dean, it really sucked, but you tried to make sure that I got one. And I wanted to keep that._

Dean lets out a short breath. He isn’t sure whether it’s mostly relief or mostly sadness.

“I get it, Sammy,” he says, quietly.

 _Yeah_. Sam’s silent for a long moment, and when he speaks again his voice is brighter. _So_ , he goes on. _This ‘Cas’ guy. What’s the deal there?_

Dean shrugs. This is a part of the conversation he could really do without. “I don’t know, man,” he says. “I guess he’s like us, like Mom and Dad were. Been told that people in other silos were fucking animals all his life, but he’s sitting there listening to them talk to each other, he figures they’re just people, something’s wrong here. Starts asking questions.” He shrugs again. “I guess. I don’t know.”

 _That’s not what I meant_ , Sam says, in a tone that suggests Dean should’ve damn well known that. _You’re friends, right?_

“I guess.”

_But you really didn’t want to talk about him. Is he in some kind of trouble? Dean, are you gonna be stuck there on your own?_

There’s worry in his voice, but Dean can’t help a snort of relieved laughter. Sam might’ve gotten everything else out of him, but he hasn’t figured out that Dean’s a pathetic infatuated moron. That’s something, anyway.

_What’s so funny?_

“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “Nah, if they’d gotten to Cas, they’d have gotten to me too by now.”

 _Be careful_ , Sam warns him.

“Jesus, quit fussing. I’m fine.”

Sam quits fussing, and Dean keeps doing his best impression of fine for the rest of the conversation,

 

 

 

 

But later, he gets to thinking about what Sam said. About wanting to keep one thing that’s all your own, when you’re under pressure from all directions, when your life’s being dissected by prying eyes.

If you’d never even had the possibility of that, if you’d grown up in a world that didn’t just lie to you but watched your every move and demanded you confess every slip-up it might miss, if you’d been told your whole life that your desires were a sin—would you even know how to want that? Would you be able to take it if it was offered?

More likely, you’d reject it out of hand, afraid of it being snatched away or turning out to be a lie, pulling the rug from under you and sending you falling. Or you’d try to give it back, the way Cas did with his ex.

Dean’s only been living this hell since Dad died, and he already has trouble believing good news.

The realisation makes him ache all over again. But this time it isn’t so painful. And he makes a decision.

 

 

 

 

When Cas does show up, he’s carrying a pack. He shucks it off his back as he pushes open the storage room door and approaches Dean holding it out in front of him, though whether he’s bringing a peace offering or shielding himself, Dean couldn’t say. He looks like he might be about to bolt as soon as he sets it down, and if he’d shown up earlier today, Dean might’ve let him, accepted the end of their friendship—or whatever it is—with grim resignation.

Instead, he looks Cas full in the eyes, shifting over to make space for him to sit down.

“I have to—” Cas begins, and Dean cuts him off.

“Cas. C’mon, just give me a minute, okay?”

Cas nods, furls up into his usual sitting position beside Dean. He sits a careful distance away, but Dean can see the tension in him, the way his hands are curled up into fists, the worried press of his lips. He looks like he wants to run away, which is more than a little disheartening, but Dean presses on, anyway.

“About the other day,” he begins, but Cas doesn’t let him get any further.

“Dean,” he says, very serious, turning on the soul-searing stare right in Dean’s face. “I’m sorry. What I did was—inappropriate. I promise it won’t happen again.” He turns his head to stare at nothing, dead ahead.

Dean wants nothing more than to reach out and take hold of him, cup his face with a hand and make him turn back, or take his hand and tug him closer. He doesn’t dare.

“You don’t gotta promise that,” he says. “I mean, I get it. If you’re not interested, you’re not interested—I’m not gonna push you.” He heaves a sigh. “And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry too. I get that it probably looks pretty skeevy to you, the way I am. And I ain’t exactly a monk, I won’t lie to you.”

He pauses, then, turns and just looks at Cas and waits for him to look back. He doesn’t have the bore-into-the-back-of-your-skull intensity thing down like Cas does, but it works; Cas meets his eyes.

Dean takes a deep breath. “But I ain’t screwing around. And I’m not disloyal. I mean it. If you’re in.” He swallows; screws up his courage and reaches over to take Cas’s hand. “So am I.”

Cas’s hand is warm, lightly calloused. Dean runs his thumb over the soft skin of Cas’s palm. Cas looks down at their hands, uncomprehending, and Dean’s heart skips.

Maybe he’s wrong. Fuck, please don’t let him be wrong.

Then Cas raises his head, meets his eyes again. They’re wide and wondering, but not with the same uncontained happiness as the other day. It’s a slower kind of amazement. Dean watches it spread over Cas’s face, watches him blink fast and wet his lips, and then he says, “Okay. Okay. I’m ‘in’.”

He closes his fingers around Dean’s, and it feels like a decision.

Relief makes Dean grin wider than he has in forever, makes him say the first dumb thing that comes into his head instead of something appropriately serious and reassuring. “You know I can hear it?”

Cas squints at him. “What?”

“When you say things in quotation marks.” He’s still grinning. “You’re a giant dork, you know that?”

Thank all the gods, Cas actually smiles back at him. Just a pleased little quirk of his lips, and then he tilts his head and says, in that voice that sounds like smoke and liquor and shouldn’t belong to him, “Then maybe we should do something other than talking.”

It takes Dean a second to process that Cas is flirting with him. Not exactly smoothly, but Jesus—that voice, the shy spark in his eyes? Dean’ll take hot as hell over smooth, any day of the week.

He’s leaning into Cas, then, wrapping an arm around his waist and pulling him close, and Cas’s hand is on his cheek, sliding around to nestle in the hair at the nape of his neck, and they’re kissing. They’re kissing, and there’s nothing chaste or experimental about it. It’s a spit-slick slide of lips and tongue and stubble, need and nerves and great overwhelming relief all at once. Dean closes his eyes and time skews, and by the time he pulls back to rest his forehead against Cas’s and catch his breath, he isn’t sure how long they’ve been kissing for. He just knows that his lips tingle and his head feels light and his dick is already half-hard, and fuck, just kissing somebody hasn’t done this to him since he was a teenager.

But he can feel the quick beat of Cas’s heart against his chest, where they’re pressed together, and Cas is breathing hard against his mouth, and yeah, he’s not the only one.

Dean sinks forward, smiling, rests his cheek against Cas’s. Cas doesn’t look like he’s shaved in a couple days, and it’s uncomfortably scratchy, but Dean can’t manage to give a shit.

“You okay?” he says into Cas’s ear.

Cas makes an amused sound, a rumble in his chest more than a laugh. “I don’t think that’s the word I’d choose,” he says. “But yes.”

Dean closes his eyes again, content just to stay there, holding on to Cas, for now. It’s only a moment before Cas stiffens.

He peels himself away from Dean like it’s physically painful, raises Dean’s hand to the light to look at the time display on his wrist, and his face drops. “I have to go,” he says.

Dean squeezes his hand. “Yeah,” he says, not letting go. “I get it.” He sighs. “It sucks.”

Cas sighs right back at him. “It does ‘suck’, yes,” he says. But he gets to his feet, and he leans in to press one more light kiss to Dean’s lips, and then he’s gone.


	15. Chapter 15

 

Dean was aware of it before, mostly during the long, dragging hours of the night, but now he’s really feeling how short the time he and Cas have together is. He didn’t notice it so much, when all they did was talk and exchange awkward looks. Maybe it has something to with how Cas is shitty at small talk—just gets right to the point, politeness be damned—so it feels like he’s said more in a half an hour than most people do all day.

Whatever is is—Dean’s always thinking about it, now. Now there’s more to _them_. They barely have time to get from a kiss hello to lying pressed together in Dean’s bedroll, breathing hard, hands pushed under coveralls and t-shirts, before Cas looks at the time and tears himself away with woeful eyes, whispering apologies against Dean’s neck, his mouth, his ears. They haven’t gotten past kissing, and Dean’s okay with that. Even if they didn’t have to cram everything into the time Cas manages to snatch after his shifts and while his brothers and sisters are sleeping, Dean figures he’d still want to take it slow. His antsiness isn’t just gonna vanish into thin air with a couple reassuring words. Dean gets that.

Doesn’t mean he doesn’t think about it, though.

Cas unfolds himself out of their little cocoon of hands and kisses and body heat, and drags himself back up top for another shift staring into space in the server room—which his silo has outfitted as a comms room with a bunch of listening posts—eavesdropping on voices he’ll never be able to speak to. Dean hangs onto his dignity, just about: he doesn’t grab Cas and crush him close and tell him, _don’t go, don’t go_ , like he wants to. He doesn’t punch the wall in frustration because Cas has to go be his family’s bitch while Dean spends endless-seeming hours sitting alone. But when Cas says goodbye it leaves him hollow, aching, and—since his libido seems to have woken up from its life-turning-to-shit-induced coma—horny as hell.

So, he deals with his frustration the same way he always has. He makes sure the door’s securely closed, switches off his flashlight so he’s alone with the faint hiss of the radio and his fantasies, unzips his coverall and strokes lazily at his half-hard cock through his underwear. And he thinks about Cas.

Now he can actually admit it, think about it without trying to shove it away, he wonders if he’s wanted Cas ever since he heard his voice on the radio. The smoke-and-sex growl of it; no way it should belong to somebody who’s probably never even had a drink, never cut loose, in his life.

Yeah, but Dean wants to see what happens when he finally does. To have Cas laid out under him, wide-eyed and undone by pleasure, startled that he’s actually capable of feeling that good. Or, Jesus, to just give himself over, let Cas pin him down and pound into him until both of them are wrecked and shaking.

The thought sends a shiver of heat through him, tingling down to the base of his spine, and he lets out a sigh, reaches into his underwear to wrap a hand around his cock and start pumping it in earnest.

He imagines Cas’s wiry strength holding him down. Wonders if Cas would be into that, leaving bruises, maybe even pressing teeth into his neck. Cas’s hands pinching at his nipples, gripping his hair, Cas’s voice in his ear, growling at him to _let me see you_. The way Cas would look at him.

Being the focus of that intensity does things to him. It ought to be uncomfortable, he knows—but there’s something open about it, too, the way Cas looks at him with undisguised curiosity, undisguised hunger. It makes Dean think about how little Cas really knows about life and people, cooped up in a half-dead silo with his crazy ‘family’. It makes him want to protect Cas—but it makes him want to trust Cas, too. Just lay himself open and let Cas make of him what he will, and honestly, it’s scary as hell.

Hot as hell, too, though. The thought of it is a low throb of heat, close to spilling out of him. He imagines Cas on his back, getting his mouth on Cas and making him squirm until he loses it, flips them over and—

_Dean?_

It takes a moment for Sam’s voice to penetrate the fog, but when it reaches Dean’s brain, it’s like a bucket of cold water.

He scrambles into a sitting position, grabbing instinctively at his coverall to zip himself up, even though there’s nobody here to see. He hopes Sam didn’t open the channel in time to hear any heavy breathing.

He swallows hard. “Yeah, Sammy,” he gets out. “I read you.” His throat’s dry and his voice wobbles a little. He winces, but tells himself that there’s no way Sam’s detected any weirdness over the radio.

No such luck.

 _Dude, are you okay?_ comes Sam’s voice. _You sound weird._

“Weird? Nah, I’m fine. Just, uh. Just thirsty.” Dean grabs for his water canteen and takes a swig, slurping theatrically. “There. I’m awesome.”

 _O…kay_. Sam doesn’t exactly sound convinced, but he doesn’t push the subject either, for which Dean is gonna have to be eternally grateful to some deity or another. _So, things okay on your end?_

“Same old. Cas brings me food, I read stuff. Think my knee’s all healed up. Been doing the exercises Doctor Tran gave me when I fucked it up the first time. Then I read some more stuff.”

_Yeah, the Legacy. You get to the entry on ‘circuses’ yet?_

“Uh… maybe?” Actually, Dean’s started skipping the parts that don’t look either interesting or necessary. Only so much Ancient-ese a guy can read.

 _Man, that stuff is creepy. I’m telling you, the Ancients were seriously disturbed_. Sam pauses; seems to collect himself, then. _Anyway_. His voice drops, turns serious, and that can’t be good. _I got news._

Dean probably doesn’t want to know, but he makes himself say, “Dude, you didn’t lead with that?” anyway.

 _Yeah_ , Sam says, and then seems to hesitate.

“So?” Dean pushes, impatient. “Good news or bad? I mean, I can take an informed guess, but…”

 _Honestly_ , says Sam, _I don’t think I know._

Dean squints at the radio.

 _Jody’s gone missing_ , Sam goes on. _Jo and Ash and a couple others, too._

Dean’s heart takes a jump up into his throat. “When?”

_Last night. They must have gotten out before curfew. I think—they aren’t locked up, there’s no way Ruby could keep that from me, and nobody’s said anything about a cleaning. They must be hiding out somewhere._

Dean lets out a sigh that’s only half relief. While he’s been moping around, pining after the guy who saved his sorry ass, his friends have been running for their lives.

He doesn’t ever forget, really, that his sanctuary’s a prison, too. It’d be hard, what with the darkness and the long hours of solitude and the ever-present fear of boots on the stairs. But the reminder brings it back to him with a thudding realness, reminds him of what, exactly, he’s being kept from.

“They’re okay?” he manages to ask. “You’re sure?”

 _Yeah_ , Sam says, and then his voice falters. _Yeah, I hope so._

 

 

 

 

When Cas shows up in the early hours of the next morning, he finds Dean sitting up on his bedroll, curled in on himself, eyes staring at nothing. For all Sam’s reassurances, he hasn’t been able to settle, can’t get the situation back—back in his old silo, he can’t start thinking of it as _home_ again—out of his head. On some level, the whole shitshow is his doing. And now he can’t touch it, can’t fix it, can’t do anything.

Cas doesn’t greet him with a kiss, the way he’s taken to doing, these past few days. He seems to pick up on Dean’s sombre mood, his eyebrows drawing together in a frown. He drops his pack and sits down beside Dean, just close enough that their knees brush together.

He touches Dean’s back, between his shoulder blades; spreads his fingers there.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

Dean hunches forward, shrugging Cas’s hand off. When Cas just keeps looking at him, he shakes his head, dumbly. He’s torn between the irrational impulse to lash out at Cas, make him suffer for the fact that Dean’s still alive and useless, and wanting to protect him from the goddamn mess he’s rescued. So he keeps his trap shut and hangs his head in misery.

“Did you hear from Sam again?” Cas asks him. “Has something happened?”

He exhales; nods.

Cas’s voice is hushed, when he speaks next. He reaches out to touch Dean again, the briefest brush of fingertips on his shoulder, and then draws back.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and when Dean turns to look at him there’s genuine sorrow in his eyes, and shit, Cas thinks somebody’s gotten killed, doesn’t he?

“It ain’t like that, Cas,” Dean says. “Nobody’s died—nobody I know, anyway.”

“But something has happened,” Cas insists, and Dean lets his face sink into his hands.

Cas replaces his hand on Dean’s back. This time, Dean doesn’t shrug it off.

“Some of my friends,” he tells Cas, through his fingers. “People I worked with. They—they went missing. They ain’t been sent to cleaning, Sammy would know about it, but—they must’ve known Ruby was gunning for them. She’s gonna send people after them. They’re good people. They don’t deserve this crap.” He closes his eyes in defeat. “It wasn’t for me, none of this would’ve happened. And here I am, sat on my worthless ass, can’t do a damn thing about it.”

It’s a moment before Cas speaks. When he does, Dean’s startled by it.

“Dean Winchester,” he says. “You _listen to me_.”

There’s an edge in it that demands attention, and Dean opens his eyes, sits up and looks at him before he even has time to register what he’s doing. Cas is glaring at him, a fierce glitter in his eyes.

“I did not save your life,” he goes on, “to sit and listen to you blame yourself for everything that goes wrong in the world, even down to the actions of people who believe you dead. I did not save your life to listen to you tell me it was for nothing.”

Dean blinks back at him, helpless. “Maybe it was, Cas,” he says.

There’s a flicker of hurt across Cas’s eyes, but it’s gone as soon as it came, extinguished under the weight of—what? Anger? Sorrow? Dean can’t tell.

“You are not worthless,” Cas goes on. “Dean. Tell me. Apart from you, how many people knew your father’s theories?”

The question takes Dean by surprise, throws him off-balance enough that the rising tide of despair pauses. “Sammy,” he says. “Ellen. Jess. I’m pretty sure Henriksen had an idea, even if Dad never told him what he thought.” He blinks, not sure what Cas is getting at.

Cas nods. “If you hadn’t begun asking the questions, one of them would,” he says. Slower, now; measured. Like he’s trying to teach a lesson. “That’s what humans do. When we discover we’re being lied to, we won’t rest until we discover the truth. We can’t. I believe that’s fundamental.”

Dean actually blinks at him in surprise. “You do?” he says. “I thought asking questions was strictly off-limits for you guys, too. You told me that.”

“It is. But I’m beginning to wonder if I’m the only one.” Cas’s expression goes thoughtful for a moment, and Dean opens his mouth to ask the question—but Cas cuts him off, already back on the matter at hand. “Dean. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been somebody else. How could you have known that seeking the truth wasn’t the right thing to do? It should be. But the system is set up to crush those who try to do the right thing. To crush our humanity.”

There’s something anguished in his eyes, now, and in spite of everything, Dean can’t help but reach for his hand and squeeze it. Cas looks down at their joined hands in surprise; looks back up, and something like relief breaks out on his face.

He reaches up, then, cups the side of Dean’s face and leans into him. “ _You_ ,” he says. “You are the most human creature I’ve ever known. You were a good man in an impossible situation—but still a good man. I knew that before I ever loved you, and _that_ is why I saved you.” He’s inching closer again, his forehead touching Dean’s, their lips almost brushing, and his voice is quiet but the fierceness is back. “Never let me hear you say that you are worthless,” he says. “Never.”

Dean can’t look at him. He can’t. He closes his eyes. “Sorry,” he gets out. “Cas. I’m sorry.”

He feels Cas’s sigh soft against his mouth. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” Cas tells him, and then closes that last hair’s breadth of distance between them and kisses him and kisses him.

Dean keeps his eyes closed. He kisses back, but Cas seems determined to take control, like he’s proving a point, and in the end Dean just parts his lips and lets Cas’s tongue slide into his mouth. And the way he’s been feeling since he spoke to Sam—like somebody’s screwed all his insides up into a tight ball and stuffed it into his chest cavity—it starts to loosen and slip away. He feels like his blood is flowing again.

Cas is pressing him back onto the bedroll, then, still kissing him, sliding a leg between his thighs, pressing a kiss to his temple, nipping his earlobe, dipping lower to suck at the curve of his neck hard enough it’s probably gonna bruise.

 _That_ startles Dean out of his thoughts. It’s a jolt of electricity and need, and he opens his eyes to find Cas leaning in over him, lips red and eyes dark. He’s breathing hard, but when Dean meets his eyes he ducks his head, worries at his lower lip with his teeth.

“Dean,” he says, and Christ, it’s like his voice has dropped an octave, like it’s a rumble from down deep in the belly of the earth. “Is this—” He breaks off, suddenly shy, and holy shit, he’s actually asking whether _Dean_ is okay with this?

Dean can’t help it, then. He grins all over his face. “Yeah, Cas,” he says. “Yeah, it’s—awesome.” He reaches up and curls a hand around Cas’s neck to pull him back down for a kiss. His thumb brushes the pulse at Cas’s throat and he feels it flutter like a caged thing, and then Cas is kissing him again, lowering himself down to press their hips together, and it all turns into kind of a blur for a while.

A good blur. And there are things in there—fumbling with zippers, and warm skin under his hands, and Cas sucking more bruises into his neck, across his shoulders, and making a low, surprised-but-pleased kind of sound when Dean grabs his hips, fingertips digging in deep, and grinds their cocks together.

They’re both mostly naked, then, coveralls shoved in a corner—something that Cas does surprisingly naturally; Dean would’ve figured him for a neat freak—and when Cas helps get Dean out of his t-shirt he actually pauses there for a minute and just _looks_ at him, long enough that Dean starts to feel a little weirded-out and grabs for him to pull him back down.

Cas catches his hand and stops him, though, murmurs, “When you blush you blush all over” in this wondering tone that of course makes Dean turn a deeper shade of red, he can damn well feel it, and he turns his head to the side and growls, “Cas, c’mon, stop it.”

Cas smiles at him. Then presses in close again, reaches down between them to wrap his hand around both of their cocks.

Just being touched at last is awesome enough, every point of contact a pulse of electricity, but Dean has a better idea.

“Cas,” he says, “Cas, hang on, wait,” and he grabs Cas’s wrist and pulls his hand back up.

Cas’s eyes go wide, but he lets it happen, unresisting—and then they go wider when Dean sucks two of Cas’s fingers into his mouth, swirling his tongue around them, tasting the salt of Cas’s skin. He gets them good and wet, laps at his palm, tasting the salt of his skin, then guides his hand back down between them.

Cas takes hold of them both without hesitation, a couple slow, experimental strokes before he starts pumping in earnest, and fuck, that’s good.

Dean gets out a shaky, “Better, yeah?” and Cas nods his head, wild-eyed, and then his eyes slip closed and damn, he’s gorgeous, gone like this, better than Dean even imagined.

They don’t last long. It’s hot and wet and messy and _needed_ , and when Cas goes stiff and shudders and spills over his belly, Dean only needs a couple seconds to follow him, gasping out a _fuck, Cas_ that feels like a prayer, holding onto his shoulders, never wanting to let go.

 

 

 

 

He has to, eventually, of course. They’re both cleaned up and dressed, and Cas reaches out to touch his arm, his mouth opening around an apology that Dean doesn’t need to hear.

“’S okay,” he says, taking Cas’s hand and squeezing it and barely restraining himself from burying his face in the crook of Cas’s neck. “You gotta go. I get it.”

Cas sighs. “I wish—” he begins, then breaks off.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Yeah, me too.” He plasters on a smile, then. “But hey, you gotta take a shower before you head back into that dorm room, okay?” He screws up his face. “Your brothers may be weirdos but they don’t deserve to share a room with you smelling like used tissues.”

Cas makes a face, but the lines of sadness on his face have faded a little, and Dean counts that as a success.

Something else occurs to him, though—something that got lost in the rush, earlier. Something that didn’t exactly get the attention it deserves.

_I knew that before—_

“Cas,” he asks, frowning. He pushes at the door of the locker with his foot and looks at it instead of at Cas’s face. “What you said before. Did—”

Dean’s cut off short as he catches sight of something on the floor, just outside the door.

It’s a folded piece of paper. And it wasn’t there before.

Heart in his throat, he looks sideways at Cas. They trade silent glances, but Cas nods at him and he unfolds the paper.

 _You’re lucky you have me to cover for you, Castiel_ , it reads. And then, underneath, _Twenty-four, eight a.m. tomorrow. Bring your friend._

 

 

 

 

“You never did answer my question,” Dean points out, voice low, as they make their way down the staircase.

It’s easier going than the last time they made a trip like this, even if Dean is feeling a little out of shape from all that time cooped up on the storage level. He can’t risk moving around too much and being heard. His knee twinges occasionally, but the rest and the exercises Doctor Tran gave him have done their job, and he can keep up okay. They take it slow, though, treading carefully, talking in hushed voices.

Cas squints over at him. “Your question?”

“Yesterday,” Dean clarifies. “About what you said.”

“Ah,” Cas says, his face clearing. “I think—the note goes some way to explaining it.” He glances darkly down the stairs. “But yes, I should tell you what gave rise to my suspicions.”

Dean looks at him in confusion for a minute before he remembers—yeah, there was that other thing Cas said yesterday, before the whole angsty-moment-that-turned-into-handjobs thing. About suspecting he wasn’t the only person in the silo with questions.

Of course he thinks that’s what Dean’s asking about. It should be what Dean’s asking about.

When did he get so wrapped up in Cas that it isn’t? That Cas saying _before I ever loved you_ , like it’s just a fact they both know, part of the furniture, has gotten to be more important?

He shakes himself, looks back over at Cas. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you should. Tell me about that.”

“During my shift, before I came down to see you,” Cas begins, “I heard something on the radio. Very faintly. It was different than what I’m used to hearing. Silo One’s communications go straight to the point. There’s no room in them for anything but business.” Cas frowns. “But this voice just said, _hello, are you there? It’s me, Kali_. It sounded like someone calling out to a friend.”

Dean looks at him. “Like us,” he realises. “When I was back ho—back in my silo.”

“Exactly.”

“So, what do you think?” Dean asks. “Someone else in here got a pal in another silo?”

“I don’t know what to think,” says Cas. “It would be dangerous to assume.”

Dean raises an eyebrow. “And going down to meet whoever the fuck this is, doing just like they said, no plan B? _That_ ain’t dangerous?”

Cas huffs at him, but it isn’t real annoyance. Whoever left that note, they know where Dean’s been hiding, and that Cas is the one helping him.

It isn’t a real argument, because they don’t have a real choice.

The note-writer knows where he sleeps. That puts Dean on edge. If whoever this is isn’t on their side, then he’s gonna have to pack up and find somewhere else to hide. Somewhere further down in the silo, probably. Further from Cas.

The thought makes him ache. Okay, so he was never gonna be able to stay in one place forever—was always gonna have to run like a rat, sometime. But having the precious little time he and Cas manage to steal together winnowed away even further—that’s fucking personal.

Plus, the further down they go, the more creeped-out he gets. It’s the mirror image of how things were in his own silo. Getting closer to the down deeps was always a comfort; meant he was going home. It was the up tops, with their order and quiet and their proximity to IT, that gave him the heebie-jeebies. Here, though, Cas is up top, and Cas is the only thing in this silo that feels like home. Between the inhabited levels and Mechanical, there’s just a great empty stretch of deserted levels, and each flight of stairs gets them closer to lost in the middle of it. There’s no personality, no sign that anyone ever lived here, nothing to differentiate the levels from each other. If it wasn’t for the foot-high numbers painted on each landing wall, you could climb and climb and never feel like you’d gotten anywhere.

Cas stops, suddenly, and Dean almost runs into the back of him. Cas holds up a hand, turning his head to listen like a cat that’s heard a mouse.

Only right now, it feels like they’re the prey.

They’re almost there—just one more level to go—but Cas takes the last few steps down onto the landing of Twenty-Three quietly, then ducks into the shadowy mouth of an empty corridor, jerking his head for Dean to follow.

They both freeze. Dean ends up closest to the landing, and he listens out, holding his breath. Nothing.

Sound, then—behind them. A muffled noise of protest as someone clamps a hand across Cas’s mouth and drags him back into the shadows.

Dean follows after, ready to break into a run, to put up his fists. Then the his eyes start to adjust, and the faint light from the staircase picks out Cas’s figure, facing away from him, but no longer in anybody’s grip.

Cas is looking at somebody—a guy, shorter than Cas, his face in shadow—and he has one hand behind his back. He makes a _stay back_ motion and Dean does as he’s bid, pressing himself against the corridor wall and listening as best he can over the thump of his heartbeat in his ears.

“Glad you could make it, bro,” the other guy says. His voice sounds way more cheerful than anybody here ought to.

Familiar, too. Dean’s eyes widen as he realises where he knows it from. The radio, back in his silo. This is the voice that spoke to him that one night, when Cas didn’t answer. Gabriel. Dean inches forward in the shadows, trying to get a glimpse of the guy’s face.

He’s unassuming—short brown hair, nothing much to look at. There’s a smug twist to his mouth, but his eyes don’t echo it. They’re as sad as Cas’s.

“Get to the point,” Cas says, all gravel and nervous tension. “What’s the purpose of this meeting?” Then, stiffening. “Who’s with you?”

Gabriel waggles his eyebrows. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he says. “And believe me, your secret is _way_ juicier. C’mon, Castiel—let’s see who you’ve got stashed away in Supply right under our noses.”

“You first,” Cas says, and Dean can tell his teeth are on edge.

Gabriel shrugs. “Fine,” he says, and someone steps out of the shadows behind him.

A woman with long hair. That’s all Dean can make out, but Cas sucks in a sharp breath. “ _Anna_?”

“Hello, Castiel.” She says it with affection, none of Gabriel’s smugness. Her voice is tired, though.

“ _You_ have doubts?” Cas says. “I never imagined—”

“I know,” Anna says, softly. “It’s been a long time since we were close.” She heaves a sigh. “And that’s part of why. I thought that the more time we spent together, the greater the chance I’d—infect you, I guess.”

Cas’s voice wavers. “Wanting to know the truth isn’t a disease, sister.”

“Isn’t it?” Her eyes shine like liquid in the darkness. “I wouldn’t have had you or Gabriel feel what I felt.” She looks down. “But here you are.”

“Yeah, it’s a tragedy,” Gabriel interrupts. Then he looks into the shadows—right at Dean, as though he can see in the dark. “Now, little bro, why don’t you introduce us to your boyfriend?”

Dean doesn’t wait for Cas to call out, just steps out of the shadows to stand beside him.

“Dean Winchester,” he says. “I’d say ‘nice to meet you’, but I’m not in the habit of saying things I’m not sure I mean. So, you gonna tell us what this is about, or what?”

For a moment, he gets no reply. Anna stares at him openly, eyes wide in her pale face. Even Gabriel gawps for a second before he composes himself, and Dean remembers that neither of these people have ever seen somebody who isn’t part of their ‘family’ before.

This isn’t like his silo, where you could live your life without ever meeting everybody. Seeing a stranger must feel like seeing a ghost, or a horse, or a fairy, something out of a kids’ picture book.

Gabriel schools his expression back into nonchalance pretty quick, though, raises his eyebrows and turns to Cas. “Where’d you dig this one up, bro? He’s a real charmer.” Then he turns a sly, sideways appraising look on Dean. “Cute, though. Hope he’s worth the risk.”

“Dude, I’m right here,” Dean protests, at the same time as Cas lets out an exasperated sigh and says, “Gabriel, be serious.”

“I’m always serious,” Gabriel says. “But yes, I know where you found him. We had a little chat on the radio, didn’t we, Deano? Gotta say, it was rude of you to hang up on me like that.”

Dean snorts. “Yeah, sorry, must’ve forgotten my manners when you scared the living shit out of me.”

“Touchy.”

“Guys.” Anna’s soft voice cuts through the bickering. “Let’s get to the point.”

“Yeah,” says Dean. “What _is_ the point? This some kind of power play? You know what Cas has been up to, so now he’s your bitch? Or are you two the revolution? ‘Cos I gotta tell you, I ain’t exactly had the best of experiences with trying to change things.”

“Why don’t you tell us about what happened, Dean?” Anna suggests. “We know that you’re from Silo Thirty-Four, and that you were sent to cleaning—that’s the only possible explanation for your being here. Tell us how that happened.”

 _Silo Thirty-Four_. It’s jarring, hearing his silo referred to like that. Funny: he knows this is Twenty-One, and the bigwigs who run the whole system live in One, but he’s never once thought to ask the number of his own silo.

“Sure,” Dean says. “Just as soon as you tell me why you want to know.”

Anna smiles at him, a little apologetic. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It must be a disconcerting, having questions thrown at you like this. But I’m not like my brothers—” She indicates Cas and Gabriel with a wave of her hand. “I’ve never spoken to somebody from another silo. I thought it couldn’t be true, what we were always taught—that you’re all animals, barbarians, that you’d tear the world outside apart if you were allowed to get near it. But it seemed too dangerous to try.” She takes a step towards him, her eyes beseeching. “And now here you are, and I want to _know_. Please.”

Dean looks at Cas before he says anything. This whole thing has his thoughts spinning like a top. Between Gabriel’s general dickery and Anna’s apparently earnest curiosity, he’s wrong-footed. But Anna—she’s the sister Cas trusted, the one who soothed his nightmares as a little kid, the one it fucking killed him to lie to. She’s gotta be on the level, right?

Cas opens his mouth as if he’s about to say something to her, but then thinks better of it and nods.

“I think we can trust them,” he says to Dean. Then he turns his gaze on Gabriel. “But then, you tell us everything you know. Starting with who Kali is.”

Gabriel raises an eyebrow, but then his expression turns grim. “Have it your way, little bro,” he says. “But believe me when I say, you are gonna regret asking.”

 

 

 

 

Gabriel and Anna lead them along a corridor to a room in the back of Twenty-Three. The lights are on—it’s probably the only lit-up room in a hundred levels. There are two chairs, plus a bunch of others stacked in the corner, and a table with more paper than Dean’s seen in his life spread across it.

His eyes widen when he catches sight of it. Gabriel smirks and says, “Yeah, our silo has this thing called reading,” but subsides when Cas glares at him like he wants to bore a hole in his skull.

Dean isn’t gonna lie to himself. Seeing Cas get all riled-up and loyal like that when somebody insults him? Kind of adorable. Also kind of hot.

He doesn’t have time for that train of thought right now, though, so he asks, “Why’d you say Twenty-Four when you guys are set up here?” instead.

“Just screwing with you,” Gabriel smirks, but an exasperated look from Anna silences him.

The way she’s able to convey, _be serious_ with just a glance and a raised eyebrow actually reminds Dean of Sam, and for a moment he’s hit with a wave of homesickness so powerful it stuns him. The way these three interact, like bickering siblings any way you slice it—it makes him rethink his old assumption that Cas never had a real family. It reminds Dean that he doesn’t have his family anymore, opens up the aching hollow of loss in his chest that’s probably never gonna go away.

Cas is awesome, Cas saved his sorry life, Cas makes him dizzy with want and need—but without Sam, Bobby, Jo, the people who are woven into his personal history, Dean doesn’t feel like all of him is here. Whatever he feels for Cas—and Dean is afraid to put a name to the intensity of it, if he’s honest—he can’t make up for their absence.

Cas touches his arm, bringing him back to the present, and he blinks, tries to focus in on Anna’s reply.

“Basic caution,” she’s saying. “We weren’t going to lead you right to us. Not without knowing we were all on the same page.”

“Who says we are?” Dean says. “You guys haven’t exactly been forthcoming.”

“I told you.” Anna looks at him, all wide-eyed sincerity, and she doesn’t exactly have Cas’s artlessness, but Dean believes her. He hopes that isn’t just because he wants to. “I just want to know.”

Gabriel looks like he’s about to open his mouth, maybe argue, but he falls silent when Dean shrugs and says, “Okay.”

They arrange themselves around the table. Dean stares at the papers spread out across it, trying to figure out the mess of scrawled notes and diagrams, but it might as well be in secret code for all the sense it makes. For all he knows, it is.

Dean finds himself sitting beside Cas, opposite Anna, who leans forward attentively, looking like she might be about to grab a pen and start taking notes, and Gabriel, who leans back in his chair with one eyebrow raised, his expression somewhere between expectant and sardonic. His eyes are sharp as pins, though, and they fasten on Dean and stay there. He starts to feel uncomfortably like he’s being interviewed.

He feels Cas’s hand cover his, then, lacing their fingers together and squeezing, in full view of his siblings. Dean looks at him in surprise, notices Anna’s startled glance out the corner of his eye. (Gabriel, for some reason, doesn’t look even the tiniest bit perturbed.) Cas colours, lowers his eyes a little, but he doesn’t let go, and Dean finds himself smiling and squeezing back in silent thanks, or reassurance, or he-doesn’t-really-know-what.

And if he finds it comforting, that steady presence at his side in the middle of all this uncertainty—well. It’s not like anybody else has to know.

 

 

 

 

By the time he’s gotten through the whole sorry tale, Gabriel isn’t feigning indifference anymore. He’s sitting forward, all attention, when Dean finishes with, “Ruby had me sent to cleaning, and if anybody in my silo had tried to stop it, she would’ve gotten them too. If Cas hadn’t gone up there and saved my ass, I’d be toast. So, yeah. Here I am.”

Gabriel cocks an eyebrow. “You know,” he says. “I suddenly feel a whole lot better about this silo.”

Cas, still sitting at Dean’s side, frowns. “Really?”

“No. But hey. People with power are assholes everywhere. Our people suck.” Gabriel jabs a finger at Dean. “His people suck. We’re no better and no worse than anybody else. This is just the proof.” He turns his head, then, looks at Anna. “The question is, what do we do with it?”

“Do with it?” Dean echoes.

“We do nothing,” says Cas, a warning note in his voice.

“I agree,” Anna puts in. “We should be cautious. Most of our brothers and sisters have never thought to question Our Father’s word. It’ll take time to find those who might be receptive to the truth and encourage them to come to us. We need to be sensible about this, maybe see what else we can find out from Gabriel’s contact in Silo One. All of us are in danger if we try anything right now.”

Cas nods, his fingers tightening around Dean’s.

Honestly, Dean can’t say he’s happy about being involved in this crap at all. He’s already seen his own silo torn apart because people tried to find out the truth, and it only sounds like things are gonna keep on getting worse over there.

Sam’s words keep echoing in his head. _I don’t even know if there is a right thing_. Dean’s starting to agree. Letting the lie live on is wrong, like Cas said, but if trying to bring it down gets more good people killed? Yeah, Dean might just have to resign himself to hiding. He has enough of this crap on his conscience already.

It’s starting to look like he doesn’t have a choice, though. He’s in it, now, and so is Cas. They were in it from the moment they read the damn note. At least Anna seems like she has a little common sense.

“If we gotta do anything at all,” Dean says, “we gotta be careful about it.”

“ _Why?_ ”

Gabriel’s outburst startles everybody. They turn to stare at him as one. He’s out of his seat, hands planted on the tabletop, his front of amused indifference suddenly cracking apart. He gestures at Dean.

“We’ve got a perfect example of people from other silos not being completely awful sitting right here, and we’re not gonna _do_ anything with him?”

“Hey!” Dean objects.

Gabriel ignores him. “We could finish it. All the lies, having to live with this crap day in, day out? It could all be _over_.”

“And we could all be dead,” Anna points out.

“Who cares?” But Gabriel stops, then; his shoulders sag and he sinks back into his chair. “I’m tired,” he says, and looks miserably down at his hands. “I’m really, _really_ tired.”

Anna reaches out to squeeze his shoulder. Uncomfortable, Dean glances away. Yeah, Gabriel’s a Class-A dick, but this seems like a family moment he really shouldn’t be sitting in on.

Cas interrupts it, glancing around at the papers covering the tabletop and pinned to the wall, and asking, “All this information. Did it come from your contact in Silo One?”

Gabriel glares at him, but after a moment he answers, “Most of it.” He shrugs, makes an expansive gesture with both hands. “You boys may as well make yourselves at home.”

Apparently taking him at his word, Cas gets up, frowning at a diagram pinned to the wall. It shows a series of small rings, arranged at regular intervals inside of a larger one, plus a few other markings that mean nothing to Dean. Cas seems absorbed, though, getting out of his seat and going over to examine it.

“Thing is,” Gabriel goes on, and Dean pauses halfway out of his chair. “Not everything Kali told me can be put down in a diagram.” His smirk is back, but there isn’t one iota of amusement in it. “Like, you know how Our Father supposedly thought the Ancients wanted to save humanity from a hostile world? Kept going right along with that idea, even though the infinite wisdom and compassion of Silo One had them trying to kill us all?”

Cas has gone still where he stands. He turns on the spot, his eyes drawn to Gabriel, even though he looks like he really doesn’t want to hear this.

“Yeah, no such luck. You think the people who planned this foresaw the end of days and decided to build the silos out of the goodness of their hearts? That their little social engineering programme was just an altruistic bonus?” Gabriel shakes his head. “The Ancients saw the end coming, alright. The old world was never stable, and they’d developed weapons that could destroy the whole thing. Scorched earth. Just like you see up there. So they decided, world’s going out with a bang anyway, let’s make sure we’re the ones lighting the fuse. Have it on our own terms. Our ancestors built the silos.” His smirk twists for a moment, into something like anguish. “And then they pressed the button.”

They all stare for a moment. Anna too. It looks like she hasn’t heard this little speech before.

“I can’t believe it,” Anna says, after a moment. “Why would anybody—”

“You can’t believe it? Sis, have you looked around the place lately?” He turns to look her in the eyes, pleading. “You know what kind of a world we live in. Does it really seem that unlikely to you? Our Father, _wake up_!”

Anna just looks at him for a moment, her pale face still and sorrowful. It’s a moment before she speaks.

“Then make us understand,” she says. “Tell us why they’d destroy humanity if they meant to save it. Why they’d save humanity if they meant to destroy it.”

“They built the silos. They set up the whole system. The Order, the cleanings. They made all of our little worlds in their own image: ruled through fear. And the one that survived—the one that replicated the bad old days, _their_ bad old days, the best—would inherit the earth. Destroying the old world? No problem, just as long as the new one grew up in their image, not some other nation’s.”

“All of this?” It’s Cas’s voice, low and cracked. “Just to—”

“Win the long game. Like I said, bro. People are assholes.”

With that, Gabriel gets up, the scrape of his chair on the bare floor loud in the silence. He stalks out the room and off down the corridor.

The silence holds, draws out for a long moment. It’s Anna who breaks it, standing up and making to follow.

“I’ll go catch him,” she says. She’s pale, but her voice is steady. “He needs to calm down before we get back up top, or he’ll start to draw attention.” She shakes her head. “He’s been acting pretty unstable, lately. I guess… this explains it. But we can’t risk Naomi or Zachariah noticing something’s up.”

Cas nods. Anna hesitates a moment before leaving.

“You should try not to be long, Castiel,” she tells him. “If all three of us are missed, there will definitely be questions.”

“I’ll be there soon,” Cas promises. He sounds hoarse.

 

 

 

 

They make the climb back up mostly in silence, too.

They pause just inside the storage room. Dean reaches down to take Cas’s hand in his own and then stands there, not wanting to let go.

“Do you think it’s true?” Cas says into the silence, startling him.

Dean shrugs. “I don’t know, man. You guys know more about the Ancients than I do.”

But Cas just keeps looking at him, a pleading urgency in his eyes. “Maybe. But do you believe it?”

“I guess—” Dean sighs. “I guess I wouldn’t be surprised. If he’s right. Just, you know—our worlds are shitty. Why should the Ancients _not_ have been shitty?”

Cas sighs, eyes downcast. “I guess you’re right.”

“Cas.” Dean tugs at his hand to pull him close. “Cas. Remember what you said to me, the other day? The fact I lived in a crappy system didn’t make me a crappy person? Okay, so our ancestors were crappy people and they built this crappy system and they did it for crappy reasons. Doesn’t mean we have to be like them. Doesn’t mean we can’t try.”

After a moment, Cas breathes out, heavy, and buries his face in the crook of Dean’s neck. He doesn’t say anything, but that’s okay. Dean wraps an arm around his waist, and they hold on to each other, and hold on, and hold on.


	16. Chapter 16

 

Days pass, and Dean feels like he’s holding his breath.

Every time Sam’s voice crackles through the radio, every time Cas shows up, there’s a moment where he feels like he’s standing on a railing in the up tops, on the verge of losing his balance, waiting to fall to the down deeps. It takes Sam saying, _I’m fine, Dean, I’m okay_ , Cas turning on his shy smile, to break it. Then Dean can breathe again, for a little while.

They are the two poles of his existence. The two real things he holds on to, when the long hours of solitude get too much and his brain decides it’s an awesome idea to run through all the different, imaginary ways shit could get worse than it already has. His lifelines.

He hasn’t dreamed about drowning in a while. That’s something, right?

Sam talks to Dean whenever he can, but it’s difficult. Dean gets that. Sam can’t risk Ruby catching him, or he’s gonna be in a world of shit and unable to help. Dean goes for days without any word from him, sometimes.

Cas—Cas is his constant. But there’s something sadder, more worn-down to him now, since Gabriel’s little revelation. Dean’s always sucked at optimism. He doesn’t have the words for it, and when he tries to put encouragement into his voice, it sounds false even to him. Instead, he does what he can to kiss hope into Cas’s mouth, write it across his skin with his fingertips, hoping he’s better at giving it than he is at feeling it.

Sometimes he thinks they communicate better like this than they ever did with words. It’s hard to get a blowjob wrong, you know? And the way Cas loses it—coming apart squirming under him, or shoving him down onto the bedroll and holding him there, leaving marks with fingers and teeth—that’s a thing nobody could tell him in words, and it’s one truth Dean’s happy to know.

Still. Some days he gets this feeling where he wants to just take Cas’s hands and stop him before things get too hot and heavy, sit there beside him and listen to whatever he has to say, know him every possible way. That they don’t have time to talk _and_ fuck to their hearts’ content feels like a goddamn crime.

Dean finally meets someone who he won’t ever be able to get enough of. Who makes sense of it all: the dumb poems Ms Moseley had them learn at school; the love notes graffittied on staircase walls; the slurred, goofy-grinning way Benny talks about Andrea when he’s had too much to drink; the way Sam and Jess look at each other like there’s nobody else in the room. Dean finds that, and their lives don’t even give them time to get started.

Today, Cas shows up after his shift, like usual, sinks onto the bedroll next to Dean and they just kiss for a minute before Cas peels himself away to root around in his pack. Dean watches him and waits.

“I spoke to Gabriel,” Cas says, a distracted little frown on his face.

“Huh,” says Dean. “He about to do something stupid?” It’s a worry that gnaws at him, the idea of Cas’s asshole brother deciding to take things into his own hands and make some grand announcement that’s gonna land them all in the shit.

Cas shakes his head. “I don’t think so. He’s been speaking to his contact in Silo One again.”

“That Kali chick? The one you heard on the radio?”

“Yes.” Cas finally finds what he’s looking for and pulls it out of the pack. Paper, a stub of pencil. “I’m trying to understand something.”

He smooths a sheet of paper out on the floor, and starts drawing. Dean watches his face as he does so. The intent focus of his eyes; the crease of concentration between his brows. He works slowly and carefully, but his hands are sure.

Cas absorbed in a task is a hell of a distraction. It’s easy to get caught up thinking about what he looks like when he’s involved in other stuff, and so it’s a long moment before Dean realises what he’s drawing.

It’s the diagram from the wall down on Twenty-Three, the one Cas was staring at the other day. That series of regularly spaced-out circles inside a bigger one. Looking at it now, Dean takes time to count them. Fifty-two.

He glances over at Cas. “Those are the silos?”

“Yes.” Cas is still frowning. “What Gabriel told me was incomplete. His contact was called away before they were able to finish their conversation.”

“Okay?” Dean squints at the drawing. Cas has shaded in a few of the circles, and after a couple minutes it occurs to him that those are the dead silos. The ones that _went dark_. He wonders if any of those still have people living inside them, skeleton populations like Cas’s ‘family’, or if they’re all just great big tombs.

Still, there are more white circles than dark on the drawing. All those people, just going about their lives unaware. Close enough to reach on foot, if only there was a safe way to do it. The idea of it still doesn’t feel completely real.

“What she said,” Cas goes on, “was that _the way out is in the down deeps_.” He looks down at the drawing again, shaking his head. “I don’t understand. Out of the silo? How could there be a way out down there?”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “That’s weird.”

But a memory’s resurfacing, something that’s gotten buried under the endless shower of shit that’s been his life over the past couple months. Not a memory, really: a habit. Back in Mechanical, there was a certain spot in the silo wall you could bang on, if you wanted to get somebody’s attention from across the level. Anywhere else, the sound would be muffled, not loud enough to hear over the noise of the generator. But right there? The sound carried. A hollow sound, like there was something other than solid earth out there behind the wall. An empty space for it to echo in.

“I don’t know,” Dean says. “But—what if there was some kind of a tunnel down there?”

“But why?” Cas still looks baffled. “Where would it go?”

Dean shrugs, looking back at the drawing. “I have no clue.”

Cas is still looking at the drawing, his eyes searching, helpless. Dean puts an arm around his shoulders.

“If there was something more,” Cas says, after a moment. “If there was a way out of this…”

“I know, Cas,” Dean says, quietly. “I get it.”

Cas sighs, sagging against him, and Dean turns his head, mouths gently at his jaw, turns his head and finds Cas’s lips and presses a soft kiss there. Cas’s eyes slide closed.

“It sucks,” Dean says. “I know it. Most of everything sucks. But not all of it. You got me, I got you. That’s gotta count for something.”

Cas doesn’t answer, not out loud anyway, but he tilts his head minutely and lets Dean kiss him, lower him down onto the bedroll and press kisses to his cheeks, his eyelids, slide hands under his coverall to stroke slow circles on his skin. For once, it doesn’t feel like it’s leading anywhere. It’s comfort, pure and simple, and weirdly enough, Dean finds that he’s fine with that. If this what Cas needs from him, then he’ll give it, and he’ll hope that it’s enough.

Maybe it’s what he needs, too.

 

 

 

 

Too soon, Cas is opening his eyes and sitting up, leaning in to give Dean one last soft kiss before he has to leave. His footsteps recede up the staircase, and then the anxiety is back, clawing in Dean’s guts, making itself at home there.

Dean turns back to the locker, and finds that Cas has left his drawing behind. He picks it up, squinting at it to distract himself. He arranges himself cross-legged on the bedroll, sets down the Legacy volume he’s currently using in front of him and flattens out the drawing—creased where his foot or Cas’s must have shoved at it while they were distracted—on top of it.

Fifty-two silos. The number’s familiar, nagging at him until he remembers something from the first volume he read, that history of the world in death and statistics. The landmass they’re on, where the silos were built, the Ancients called _North America_. But America was a country, too, made up of a bunch of different—territories? States? He thinks that’s what they were called. Fifty-two of them.

Coincidence? Or did every one of those places build a silo of their own, transport a bunch of people across that vast open space to put them away safe underground before they got together and pressed the button on Armageddon? How would that even work?

Dean has no answers. He goes back to staring at the drawing, trying to figure out what Gabriel’s friend could have meant, ignoring the fear that’s sunk its teeth into him.

 

 

 

 

He’s still looking at the drawing when the radio crackles to life.

 _Dean_ , Sam says. _It’s me._

Dean sets the drawing aside, brightening. “Hey, Sammy.”

_You okay?_

He shrugs. “Okay as I can be. Cas’s asshole brother hasn’t done anything to screw us all yet.”

 _Well, that’s something_ , Sam replies, and that’s when Dean picks up on the tight, anxious undercurrent in his voice. Abruptly, the gnawing feeling in his stomach is back.

“Sam?” he says. “You got news?”

 _Yeah_.

“So?” Worry makes him impatient. “Dude, spit it out, don’t screw around with the small talk.”

 _So_. Sam pauses, and Dean can picture the scrunched-up face he’s making as he hesitates, the way he looks like he’s in physical pain when he has to say something difficult. _You know I told you about that barricade in the mids?_

“What, like, half a level sectioning itself off? Yeah, I remember. Ruby managed to starve ‘em out yet?”

 _No_ , Sam says, and the anxiety’s still there in his voice, but shot through with something else. Excitement? _No, that’s just it. The barricade—more people have joined in. Dean, the whole lower half of the silo’s refusing to recognise her authority. Walker has most of Security down there, but there isn’t a whole lot he can do. They’re outnumbered._

Dean actually gapes at the radio. “Seriously?” he says. “Who’s behind it?”

 _I’m hearing conflicting stories_ , Sam tells him. _But I’d be surprised if Jody didn’t have anything to do with it. Bobby too, maybe, in the down deeps. And Ruby actually sounds like she’s running scared. She kicked me out of here yesterday, while she spoke to Silo One, when usually she has me listen in. I didn’t catch everything, but it sounded like she was trying to convince them everything was under control. I mean, she sounded _freaked_. I think she was trying to hide it from me._

“Don’t tell me you’re feeling sorry for that murdering fuck?” Dean means it for a pitch-black joke, but there’s an edge of anxiety in it that gets past him.

Sam heaves a sigh. _Honestly?_ he says. _Sometimes I do. She seriously thinks she’s doing the right thing. I believe that. Then he pauses. But it doesn’t mean I think she’s right. She’s killed people I love, too._

The reminder makes Dean flush, and he’s glad, for once, that Sam can’t see his face. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, Sammy, I know. Sorry, man.” He clears his throat. “So, what do you think’s gonna happen over there?”

_Honestly? I don’t know. Wouldn’t say I’m sleeping easy, though. People start running scared, they get paranoid._

“You think Ruby’s onto you?”

_I hope not. But if she is? I’m not gonna back down. Ruby can send me to cleaning if she wants. I’m not letting any more innocent people die._

It’s Sam’s no-arguments voice. He doesn’t use it often, but Dean knows it well, remembers it from the last conversation they had before Sam went up to shadow in IT. Of course, that one ended with Sam storming out and Dean punching the wall until his knuckles bled, and then Sam didn’t speak to him for two years.

This time, he just lets out a sigh and says, “Be careful.”

 _Yeah_ , Sam says, and then, after a second, _You too. I’ll speak to you soon, Dean._

He cuts the connection.

After a moment, Dean picks the drawing back up and tries to focus on it again. It’s no use. All he can see is Sam’s face, locked away behind the bars of a cell.

 

 

 

 

Dean doesn’t sleep that day. When Cas shows up in the evening, he sets his pack down and makes to pick up the drawing—but then he gets a look at Dean’s face and abandons it, crawling onto the bedroll beside him and pressing in close. They don’t talk, just kiss, sloppy and desperate, clutching at each other.

Cas tugs at his clothing, but when Dean sits up and starts to help him get it off, Cas shakes his head and pushes him down onto his back and holds him there.

“Let me,” he says, and it’s a plea. “Let me.”

Dean gets it. There’s nothing Cas can do to fix the situation back home. There isn’t even anything he can do to fix the situation here. Giving each other comfort, words or bodies, that’s all they’ve got. And Dean’s selfish enough to admit that it is comfort, being touched and wanted and needed like this, the way it pushes all the fear out of his mind for a little while. He’s selfish enough to take it, any way Cas wants to give it to him.

Even if he doesn’t have the right to it. Not while Sam’s in danger and his friends are suffering back home.

Like he’s reading Dean’s thoughts, Cas places a hand on his forehead, looks deep into his eyes. “Stop it,” he says. “Come back here. Come back to me.”

Dean closes his eyes, because that look gets to be too much for him sometimes, but he swallows and says, “Okay,” low and rough in his throat.

Cas is kissing him again, then, as deft hands work open the zippers of his coverall; a wet trail down his neck, his chest, his belly, gentle nips on the insides of his thighs before Cas mouths at his cock. The wet heat of his mouth is such a fucking relief that Dean’s breath stutters in his throat. Cas makes this low, satisfied noise, and Christ, it’s still intoxicating, seeing how Cas has gone from the repressed almost-virgin who turned tomato red when he caught Dean in his underwear to taking control like this.

It’d be easy to get caught up and swept away in it—so Dean does. He lets himself not think about anything else for the moment, and by the time he’s coming hard with Cas’s lips wrapped around his cock and two of Cas’s fingers buried inside him, he’s gone, it’s all gone, his mind is blank and it’s the best thing he’s felt in months.

 

 

 

 

Cas is cleaning them both up, zipping up his coverall ready to leave, when Dean stops him with a hand on his arm. Cas looks at him.

“Dean?” he says. “Are you okay?”

His eyes fasten on Dean’s, questioning and full of concern, and suddenly Dean’s really feeling the fact that Cas is dressed and he’s still mostly naked, and it makes him feel open and exposed enough that he gets this stupid urge to crawl under his blanket. He swallows it down, makes himself look right back into Cas’s eyes.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’m—well, whatever ‘fine’ means these days.”

Cas doesn’t look reassured. Dean runs his hand down Cas’s arm, slides his fingers between Cas’s and squeezes his hand.

“It ain’t anything bad,” he says, in what he hopes is his most reassuring voice. “I just.” He pauses. “Remember that thing you said, the other day?”

Cas frowns. “About thinking someone else had questions?” He looks totally bemused. “I don’t see how that’s relevant right now.”

“No, genius.” Dean manages a little smile. “That wasn’t even what I was talking about before Gabe and Anna found us.” He dips his head. “I ain’t that smart.”

“Dean.”

“Okay, okay. I’m a fucking genius.”

“Better,” Cas says, and if it weren’t for the way his eyes crinkle up when he’s finding something amusing, Dean could swear he’s being serious.

“Anyway,” says Dean, mouth suddenly dry. “Point is. You said—you said you loved me.”

“Ah.” Cas looks away from him, at the floor. There’s a flush to his cheeks the dim lighting can’t hide. Dean reaches out to him, takes hold of his chin and gently turns his face back.

“Cas, I’m trying to say—I—aw, man, you know what I’m trying to say, right?” He gives Cas a pleading look. “I’m no good at confessions or whatever, but. You gotta know.”

Cas smiles at him. It’s faint, but it’s there, it’s genuine. “I think I do,” he says.

 

 

 

 

If their lives were a fairytale, or one of those stories on tape Ms Moseley used to listen to on her coffee breaks, then that would be some kind of an endpoint. Love may not be all you need, but sometimes it’s enough. Something like that.

But life just keeps on keeping on, and too soon, Cas is gone and Dean’s alone with the radio silence again, fear wearing new holes in his insides.

Sam doesn’t get back to him that day, or the next, or the next, and eventually he’s tense enough that even Cas’s presence can’t banish it. Dean even snaps at him, irritable, a couple times. Then he feels like shit, and he feels even more like shit when Cas nods understanding and places a hand on his back or his shoulder and sits there with him quietly while he fidgets like he’s gonna shake apart.

On the fourth day, while Cas is up top working his shift, the radio crackles into life. The sound is weak, buried under fuzz, and Dean can’t be sure that it’s a voice at all.

He lifts the radio close to his face, frowning, telling his pounding heart not to get its hopes up.

“Sammy?” he says. “You there?”

 _No_. It’s a woman’s voice that answers. A voice he knows, and one he hasn’t heard in what feels like a lifetime.

“ _Jess?_ ” he says in amazement. “That you?”

 _Dean?_ she says back. _Yeah. It’s me_.

“Sam with you?”

 _Yeah, he’s here_.

“So put him on.”

 _I can’t_ , Jess says, and his stomach drops.

“What happened?” he demands. “Is he okay? Did Ruby do something to him? If she did you better flay that psychotic fuck alive for me, you got it?”

 _He’s okay_ , Jess tells him, and he takes a deep breath, tries to hold onto the steadying sound of her voice because he’s shaking with fear and rage. _Or at least_ , she amends, _he will be._

“Okay,” Dean hear himself saying, and his voice sounds shaky. “Okay. What’s going on?”

 _He’s still a little out of it_ , Jess says, _so I’m not sure of all the details. Don’t worry_ , she adds, before Dean can interrupt again. _He has a shoulder injury and a concussion, but he just needs some rest and he’s gonna be fine. Doctor Tran already took a look at him. Anyway, Ruby’s been getting seriously paranoid lately. Spending a lot of time talking to Walker, and I’ve no idea why, but it sounds like the guy has a giant hate-on for your family._

Dean snorts. “Yeah,” he manages. “That ain’t a surprise, from what I’ve heard.”

 _He hasn’t exactly made a lot of friends_ , Jess says, and Dean finds himself smiling at the understatement. _The whole purity-or-bust thing, it isn’t popular, especially not these days. But he has Ruby’s ear, and I guess he finally convinced her Sam couldn’t be trusted._

“Well, I guess he wasn’t wrong.”

 _Yeah_ , Jess says, and there’s actually a note of relief in her voice. _You know—I haven’t told him this, and I probably never will, but for a little while, after I had to run—I wondered. If she’d get to him. Don’t get me wrong, I know Sam, I know he believes in doing the right thing. But being trapped for that long with somebody who’s convinced what they’re doing is right? It’d be tough to resist. I don’t know if I could._

“Yeah, well,” Dean says. “He’s a stubborn bastard when he wants to be.” He lets the pride come through in his voice and tries to let that be the only thing he feels, pushing down the memory of Sam’s, _I don’t know if there even is a right thing._

Jess laughs softly, but then her voice is serious again. _I sometimes wonder if I’m a crappy person for thinking that_ , she says. _I’m definitely a crappy girlfriend._

Dean can’t help but remember his own doubts, and he shakes his head emphatically even though Jess can’t see it. “No way,” he says. “Divide and conquer, that’s what those fuckers do. Screw with you mind, make you doubt the ones you trust—you’re only human. Don’t beat yourself up, just—just tell him you’re proud of him, okay?” He swallows. “Tell him I am, too.”

 _I will_ , Jess says. Then: _But there’s something else I have to talk to you about. Something important._

There’s a nervous edge in her voice, and Dean shifts where he’s sitting. “Yeah?”

_Ruby’s losing her grip on the silo. People don’t trust her, and they don’t like Walker. There are a lot of us. Not enough to take them down, but I think a lot of people would be persuaded if we had proof. Proof they’ve been lying to us._

“Proof?” Dean asks, though the sick feeling in his stomach tells him he already knows. “Like what?”

Jess’s hesitation before she speaks confirms it.

 _Like somebody who’s been_ outside _and lived to tell the tale,_ she says at last. _Somebody who’s come back._

 

 

 

 

The first thing Cas says when Dean tells him is, “Of course you have to go.”

He’s very still as he says it. His voice is steady, a few quick blinks the only suggestion that he isn’t a-okay. There’s no anger in his eyes, and Dean feels the tight ball of nerves in his stomach give way a little; make room for another, heavier kind of dread.

He gets to go home. He has a chance to help his friends. If he makes it back, he’ll get to see Sam again. It’s more than he’s ever dared hope for.

He has to leave Cas.

Cas can’t come with him. If they lose, if Silo One gets wind of _two_ people coming back, from the direction of Cas’s silo, then there’s no telling what they’ll do—just that it won’t be good for Cas’s silo. And however many lies Cas has told his family, he won’t risk getting them all killed. Dean already knows that.

So, that’s the future. Life without Cas. That’s what most of Dean’s life has been, but somehow now it feels impossible, like he’s just been told he has to live without air, without water, without blood in his veins. Just thinking about it makes him feel like he’s suffocating.

“Dean.” Cas’s hands close around his own, tug him back to the present. “It’s okay,” he says, though it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. How could it be?

Dean shakes his head. “Don’t say that,” he says.

“Fine.” Cas sighs. “It— _sucks_ , I think you’d say.”

Dean manages a faint smile. “Damn right I would.”

“But we don’t have a choice,” Cas goes on. “Stability’s the best thing for your silo, if you can stop Ruby from alerting Silo One to the takeover. You can give them that chance, and I know you will.”

He’s right. Dean knows that. Doesn’t make him feel any less like crap.

“You know,” he says, “it doesn’t mean I don’t—well. You know.”

“I know,” Cas tells him. “If you were the sort of person who could refuse—you wouldn’t be you.”

“You’d do the same,” Dean realises. It’s not exactly a relief, but it makes him feel a little less like a traitorous asshole.

“It’s the world we live in, Dean.” Cas ducks his head. “We don’t have the luxury of following our hearts.”

 _Luxury_. First time Dean’s heard him use that word in a long time, but right now, he can’t argue with it. Though, if he could follow his heart? It’s pulling him in two different directions. He’d end up split down the middle, bleeding out all over the floor.

He clears his throat, changes the subject. “So,” he says. “You got cleaning suits somewhere in this silo, right?” They must do, or something similar, anyway. They sent Cas’s ex _outside_ to look for Dean’s body. He wouldn’t have lasted long enough to do that without some kind of protective clothing.

Cas nods. “The one you wore when you arrived went in the refuse. We’ll have to get a new one and start from scratch.”

“Okay,” Dean says. “I’m gonna need some materials to modify it. Heat tape, a couple other things. If they’re in Supply, like in my silo, it shouldn’t be too hard to get hold of them.”

“I’ll find them,” Cas promises. Dean doesn’t doubt it; by now, he’s an old pro at petty theft. “Getting hold of a cleaning suit will be harder. They’re kept up in what was IT, near the communications room. Anna will help me, maybe even Gabriel, too, but I’ll need to wait until we’re all working at the same time. If any of our other brethren were there, we’d risk being found out. It could be a few days.”

“’S fine,” Dean says. He reaches out and takes Cas’s hand again. “Thanks, Cas.”

Cas doesn’t reply, just strokes a thumb over the back of his hand. Dean squeezes back, and wonders who’s trying to reassure who.

 

 

 

 

Days pass. Dean talks to Jess over the radio pretty regularly. Now she and Sam are on the other side of the barricade, they don’t have to worry about being caught out, and they can speak anytime. After the long weeks of uncertainty, it’s a hell of a relief. By the second time they speak, Sam is up and about, and he comes and joins in the conversations.

 _The thing that worries me_ , he says, _is, Ruby’s a fanatic. She isn’t just following orders, she really believes in what she’s doing. And she doesn’t give a crap what happens to anybody in the process—even herself. People like that are dangerous._

Maybe they both hear the echo of _like Dad_ in the statement, or maybe Dean’s just imagining it, but either way, he doesn’t push. Not just because another argument with Sammy is the last thing he wants right now, but because he’s been deliberately avoiding thinking about Dad since the whole _I don’t know if there even is a right thing_ conversation. Bringing Dad into the whole mess they’re living now, even just in the privacy of his thoughts, feels like implicating him, and Dean doesn’t have it in him to do that right now. He doesn’t have it in him to lose anything else.

“Okay,” he says to Sam. “What, you think she’s gonna call up Silo One and tell ‘em to gas us all?”

 _I don’t know_ , Sam says. _But honestly? I wouldn’t rule it out._

“Great,” says Dean. “If there was one thing this plan needed, it’s a suicidal fucking nutjob to work around.”

 _We need to get her out of the server room_ , Sam tells him. _That’s where she runs things from, most of the time. It’s the only place she can contact Silo One._

 _Maybe if we lead a delegation up there?_ Jess suggests. _Get Jody to head it up, demand that she come out and speak to us in public?_

_I don’t know. She’s gotten seriously paranoid. She might have Walker and his Security people break it up, round up the leaders and haul us in there to her. Maybe even open fire on us all._

“So, you got a better idea?” Dean cuts in.

 _Maybe._ Sam pauses. _Walker got to her, but—I don’t know, maybe I’m being egotistical here, but I think she genuinely did see me as a friend._

Jess snorts. _That’s one way of putting it._

 _Maybe_. Sam sounds uncomfortable. _I think she’s too obsessed to care much about people outside of a with-me-or-against-me kind of way, you know? But if I went up there, apologised, made like I’d seen the light—she might listen to me. That, or she’ll want to kill me herself. Either way, it works._

“What works?”

 _I tell her there’s something on the viewscreen I think she should see. If she believes me, she’ll come with; if she’s out for revenge, she’ll probably want to lull me into a false sense of security first. After I leave the mids, we open the barricades. There are enough of us to get past Walker’s men and up to the cafeteria. Then—_ Sam pauses. _Our miracle from_ outside _shows up, Ruby’s discredited, we get the silo onside. Even the whole Security section won’t be able to hold that many people._

 _It’s risky_ , Jess says.

“Yeah,” Dean agrees. Then he takes a breath, bites his lip before saying, “But it’s all we got. If anyone can pull it off, Sammy can.”

A pause. _Yeah_ , she says. Then, addressed to Sam: _Yeah, I know you can._

 

 

 

 

Cas shows up with a pack stuffed to bursting and digs out the crumpled white body of a cleaning suit. The next day he brings the helmet with him. They’re not exactly small; heavy and hard to conceal.

Dean shakes his head a little in amazement, says, “Jesus, you’re good,” and even though the reality of the suit here in their hands is another step apart, Cas affords him a little smile of pride.

Cas steals heat tape and tools for him, too. He doesn’t question it when Dean asks him to swipe some of the heat-proof stuff they use down in Mechanical and a pair of scissors, just trusts that Dean knows what he’s doing.

The comfort Dean finds in working on something with his hands is kind of independent of his brain. Even knowing that once he’s done here, he’s gonna have to leave and he’ll likely never see Cas again, Dean manages to drift off out of his thoughts, get absorbed in the task of unmaking and remaking.

He’s gonna do a better job this time, now he’s in charge of the process and he has more than a couple days to get it done. Bobby and Benny had to rush fixing up the cleaning suit for him last time. This one might last longer out there, if Dean does his job right. One thing’s for sure: if he’s leaving Cas behind for this, he is not gonna screw it up.

So he works carefully, methodical, double-checking everything. And if his attention to detail gets him a couple more days to curl up with Cas and talk to him, to feel skin on skin and exchange desperate kisses, then that’s something.

 _We deserve it_ , Dean thinks, and startles himself, because not so long ago, the idea that he deserved anything would’ve been alien to him. Now, though—now he’s pissed at the world for making them give each other up when they’ve already given up so much, risked so much, suffered so fucking much.

 

 

 

 

When he finishes, Cas isn’t there to see it. He’s still up top, a good half an hour to go before his shift is done, and Dean finds himself feeling loose and restless. He paces around the empty storage room just to keep moving, because he’s weightless and rootless and if he stops he might float up the staircase and end up bobbing against the top of the silo.

His shoulders hurt from hunching over the cleaning suit and his eyes are sore from squinting at it in the beam of his flashlight. Eventually, he grabs a towel and heads for the bathroom, deciding that a shower might make him feel a little better.

He stops before the mirror for a moment, before he strips off his coverall. He looks better than he did before he left his own silo, he thinks; he’s been sleeping more, and not being afraid that someone’s gonna drag him out of bed and have him sent to cleaning in the middle of the night has to be good for something. He’s pale, though, like you might expect from someone who’s been living mostly in the dark for weeks. There’s a heaviness to the face that looks back at him, something that wasn’t always there but that he thinks probably always will be, now.

Dean sighs, steps away from the mirror. He kicks his coverall into a corner and steps under the water.

It’s warm, running in rivulets over his cramped muscles, and he closes his eyes and tips his head back, runs fingers through his hair. It’s gotten longer than he normally wears it, tickling at his eyebrows when he leans over to read or to work. He should ask Cas to cut it for him, so he’ll look like himself when he comes face-to-face with Sam again.

When he goes home.

Not now. He doesn’t wanna think about that now. He grabs the soap, works up a lather and scrubs at his face. His hand catches the new bruise Cas sucked onto his neck last night, and it sends a sting through his whole body, the ghost of a kiss. The realisation that that’s all Cas is gonna be to him, soon. A ghost.

With a sigh, Dean gives up on trying to relax. He washes, efficient and methodical, frowning down at his feet. But he can’t stop the torrent of loss now it’s started, and he slams the heel of his hand into the wall of the shower cubicle with a noise of frustration.

“Dean?” It’s soft, but clearly audible, and he starts in surprise, almost slipping on the floor of the cubicle and righting himself with a hand against the wall.

Cas is standing in the doorway to the bathroom, looking at him.

Just like when Dean first got here, only now Cas isn’t blushing and averting his eyes. He stares right back like he’s allowed to, like Dean is _his_. (And isn’t he?) The inadvertent echo of those first days is startling enough to make Dean laugh—but it comes out mirthless, pained.

“Dean,” Cas says, again. “What’s wrong?”

“You scared the crap out of me,” Dean says, but Cas clearly isn’t having any of it.

He moves forward, his eyes on Dean’s face. “Something’s troubling you.”

Dean turns off the water, stalling, then faces Cas. He blinks water out of his eyes. He’s gonna have to tell Cas soon enough. Might as well get it done. Like ripping off a band-aid.

“I’m done,” he says, watching Cas’s eyes. “The cleaning suit.”

Cas nods, once slowly. For a moment, Dean thinks that’s all the reaction he’s gonna get. Like Cas is buttoning himself up again, hiding all of those messy feelings he isn’t supposed to have up inside. Hiding himself from Dean. Dean’s chest aches.

Then Cas drops his head, and when he looks back up, his eyes are wide, bright, full of sorrow. “Dean,” he says, softly, and then he’s stepping forward to fit his hand to Dean’s cheek, to press their foreheads together, like he doesn’t even notice there’s water dripping all over him.

“I don’t,” Dean says, and then stops because he doesn’t know what to say. Cas looks at him, questioning, and all he can manage is, “Cas, Cas, fuck, _Cas_.”

“I know,” Cas says, slipping an arm around his waist. His clothes are gonna be soaked through. Dean just leans forward into him, puts his face against Cas’s neck, tries to speak and finds himself mouthing nothings against the collar of Cas’s coverall. His thoughts refuse to turn into words.

Cas turns his head. “Tell me what to do,” he says, against Dean’s skin, and he sounds as desperate as everything in Dean is right now. Dean only has one answer, though, and it’s an impossibility.

“Make it stop,” he says into Cas’s shoulder. “Let’s just—let’s just stop.”

“We can’t.” Cas’s voice is low in his chest, rough with anguish. “You know we can’t.”

“Then make me feel like we can,” Dean tells him, drawing back to look Cas in the face, and his voice breaks on it.

Cas’s expression. It’s loss, need, hunger, tenderness, and Dean doesn’t know what to with it except hold on to him and never let go. And he can’t do that, he’ll never be able to do that, and he can feel his heart breaking in his chest. Even now, with Cas right here in front of him, Dean feels like he’s reaching out to touch and falling away into blackness.

Not being torn apart. Drowning.

But after a moment Cas steadies himself. His expression clears; his focus finds a point. He presses in close, crowding Dean against the wall, making his breath catch, making the fog of despair draw back for just a second.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll try.” And he leans in and he kisses Dean, hard.

It isn’t a kiss so much as it’s a demand, and Dean gives in easy. He parts his lips to let Cas’s tongue push into his mouth, wraps an arm around Cas to palm his ass and crush him closer, like they could turn into one being and never have to separate if he just holds on hard enough; coal to diamonds. Cas’s hands are all over him, leaving heat-trails of sensation everywhere they touch, so he feels like his whole body is lit up, and Cas is moving against him, the interested bulge at his crotch against Dean’s hardening dick.

It’d be easy to just let go and give himself up to it, like he always does, but he needs more of Cas, needs all of him, needs it fucking yesterday. (And today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and no, don’t go down that road, _stop_ —)

Dean’s thinking again, and he can’t do that, he won’t, so he reaches for the zipper of Cas’s coverall and tugs at it, wanting Cas’s bare skin under his hands, all the warmth and realness of him. He fumbles, actually shaking a little, but Cas gets the idea and shucks his coverall and his t-shirt faster than Dean knew he could move, throwing them into the corner to join Dean’s discarded clothes.

They’re pressed together again, then, skin moving against skin, breathless and needy, burning up with it. Their cocks rub together, and it’s a spike of heat that makes Dean groan, low in his throat, and then Cas’s fingers are wrapping around him. They tremble a little, but it’s heat and friction and it’s _Cas_ , and that’s enough to make him weak.

He reaches out to return the favour, Cas’s cock rock-hard and hot in his hand, twitching at the contact, and Cas’s hips stutter forward and he makes a needy sound that almost has Dean blowing his load right then and there.

They’ve done this over and over, and it never stops being awesome. But now they’re almost out of time, and Dean wants Cas every possible way. Okay, so fucking may not be the be-all and end-all of sex, but there’s nothing quite like it for leaving an ache in you, and he _wants_ it. He wants it the same way he wants the bite-marks Cas leaves on his neck, the bruises on his hips. He wants to feel it tomorrow. Take it with him.

“Cas,” he gets out, stilling his hand on Cas’s cock, watching him blink and come back to the moment. He looks at Dean with wide, dazed eyes. “I—” Dean says, and then breaks off. Because Cas is still looking at him—harder, now; focused—and his eyes darken and Dean thinks maybe he’s already getting it. He swallows. “I want you to fuck me.”

Cas just looks at him for a moment longer, his lips parted around a soft, prayerful _oh_.

Then he nods, and after that it’s like falling down a flight of stairs. Kissing their way over to the sink, somehow managing not to untangle themselves or—miraculously—to fall on their asses. Fumbling in the med kit for something to use for lube. Then Dean’s bracing his hands on the counter while Cas works fingers into him, easy, steady, and if it weren’t for the harsh pants of his breathing and the urgent way his hard-on presses into the top of Dean’s thigh, Dean could almost believe that he’s calm.

He isn’t calm, but then neither is Dean—and Dean isn’t above begging if it gets him what he needs. He angles himself against the counter, spreads his legs wider, pushing back onto Cas’s fingers. “C’mon,” he says, insistent. “Cas, please.”

Cas’s fingers still, withdraw slowly. “Okay,” Cas gasps, against the back of his neck, “Okay.”

Cas pushes into him slow, hot and blunt and just really, really _there_. This is the part Dean never really gets used to, but he rides it out, closes his eyes and breathes through the burst of pain. When Cas touches his bicep, a mute question, he turns his head to press his lips against whatever part of Cas is within reach and gasps, “Yeah, yeah, Cas, I’m good.”

Then Cas is fucking him. Hard and desperate and greedy, with one arm wrapped around his chest like he’s afraid Dean will disappear if he lets go. Dean just shuts his eyes and goes with it, feels it, the low build of heat at the base of his spine, the shiver that goes through him when Cas gets the angle just right and hits his sweet spot.

His hands are slippery with water and sweat, and he’s actually trembling a little, and his palms slip on the counter. Cas stills right away, pulls Dean back flush against him, murmuring, “Are you okay?” against the back of his neck.

Dean catches his breath, grinds back onto Cas’s cock, finding a spot that has him _this_ close to seeing stars. “Yeah,” he says, “I’m awesome. Just. Don’t. Stop.”

Somehow, he finds the brainpower to punctuate each word with a little roll of his hips, and that does it. Cas shoves him up against the counter again, hard enough that it bites into his thighs, and thrusts into him deep and slow.

It doesn’t take much. Dean’s arms shake and his balls draw up and then he’s coming hard enough that he just about forgets his own name, sagging against the counter with a low, helpless sound.

Cas wraps an arm around him and holds him there, breathing ragged, fucks into him again, and again, and once more and then he’s following in warm pulses, his forehead coming to rest between Dean’s shoulder blades.

Dean catches sight of them in the mirror above the sink, when he opens his eyes to suggest they go clean up. He has new bruises on his neck, and there’s a red stripe across the tops of his thighs from the countertop. His eyes are hollow.

Cas’s arm is still around him, Cas’s lips still on his skin; Cas is still inside of him. But Dean can feel the absence of him already, a future echo hanging cold in the air.

 

 

 

 

“I don’t want to go,” Cas tells him, later, when they’re dressed again and curled up together on Dean’s bedroll.

“I know,” Dean says into his hair. “I don’t want you to go. But you gotta. You know that. You shouldn’t even still be here.”

“Mmm.” Cas burrows his face into Dean’s shoulder. “It isn’t _fair_ ,” he says, after a moment. “We never even got to spend a night together. It isn’t fair.”

He sounds so fucking miserable, and though Dean can feel it tearing at his heart, hearing Cas echo his own useless rage at the whole situation actually makes him feel relieved.

Relieved; a little less ridiculous; a little more needed.

He doesn’t say any of that. He just breathes in—breathes Cas in, the smell of him—and murmurs, “No. No, none of it’s fucking fair,” and holds on just a moment longer.

 

 

 

 

When Cas is gone, he radios Sam.

Sam sounds surprised to hear from him, but the undercurrent of excitement in his voice when Dean says, “Well, I’m done,” is hard to miss.

There’s a pause and then, _So_ , Sam says. _Tomorrow?_

“Yeah.” Dean closes his eyes. “Tomorrow.”


	17. Chapter 17

 

“I forgot to show you this yesterday.” Cas is fishing in his pack, emptying everything out so they can stuff the body of the cleaning suit in there. He pulls his hand out holding a folded piece of paper.

“Yeah?” Dean slides in beside him and peers down at it. Their heads are bent in towards each other, their shoulders pressed together. Last time they’ll ever sit like this.

Today’s been full of last times. The last time Dean will ever hear Cas’s footsteps on the staircase. The last time Cas will ever greet him with those grave eyes, solemn _hello_ giving way to a smile. The last time Cas will ever sneak him an apple from the mids. (Dean ate it without thinking about where it came from, this time. Took it as what it was meant for: just Cas wanting to give him something.) Kisses, lingering touches, each desperate not to be the last. _Just one more. Just one more_. It’s a plea, a prayer. Dean feels it reverberate inside his ribcage. His heart beats to the sound of it.

He focuses on the paper, grateful to have something to focus on other than what they’re doing. Than how he can feel Cas slipping away from him—or himself slipping away from Cas—every moment, like a handful of water.

It’s the same drawing that Gabriel and Anna have pinned up downstairs: the series of circles that represent the silos, spaced out inside a bigger one. This version has added extras, though. There are a bunch of lines—some straight, some curving around the inside of the circle—that weren’t on the other drawing. One leads from each silo, and all of them converge on a point outside the circle.

Dean tilts his head to look at it, then forces himself to straighten up.

“What is it?” he asks.

“I’m not sure,” Cas admits. “Gabriel gave it to me, but we didn’t have a chance to speak about it.” He sighs. “Naomi’s been watching him closely. He’s behaving—erratically.”

“Not good.” Dean traces along one of the lines with his finger, hovers over the point where they all join together. _The way out is in the down deeps_. He wonders. “Cas?” he says, softly. “You think there’s something out there? _Outside?_ Something else?”

“I don’t know.” Cas shakes his head. “I don’t see how there can be. You almost died up there. But…” He trails off, his face contemplative.

Dean thinks about what he read in the Legacy. All those things the Ancients built, all the different ways of getting around. The cars, the airplanes, the boats. All those people who trekked through ice and snow to the poles of the earth; climbed up mountains; sailed around the world, even though they didn’t need to. The endless miles of roads.

“People ain’t supposed to live like this,” he says. “Are we? All cooped up underground. You know that too, right?”

Cas gives him a long look.

“I know _you_ aren’t,” he says. He sounds like he does when he says _I love you_. He sounds like he’s saying goodbye.

 

 

 

 

They’re quiet, on the climb to the up tops. Each of them shoulders a pack—one with the body of the cleaning suit in it, the helmet in the other—and they tread carefully, ducking into dark corridors and storerooms when they hear footsteps.

Cas should be in his bunk right now. He hasn’t stayed away this long since the first day Dean arrived here. It’s risky, but he insists on coming up anyway, and Dean can’t find it in him to argue. Because then Cas’s last memory of them would be Dean sending him away, and he can’t deal with that.

Aside from the fact that Dean’s knee is healed up and he isn’t hobbling anymore, it’s like their first climb down here in reverse. His crap from the storage locker is packed up and hidden away, ready to be returned to Supply or tossed in the refuse. He didn’t leave much of a mark on his space, beyond that. It feels like he’s erasing his footsteps as he retraces them. Soon enough, it’ll be like he was never here at all.

At least, that’s the best case scenario.

Cas stops, just inside the cafeteria doors, and Dean stands beside him, follows his gaze. He realises Cas isn’t looking at the airlock doors, but at the covered-over viewscreen.

Dean’s eyes have gotten used to the dark, all the time he’s spent hiding in it, so he can make out the design painted over the screen pretty clearly. It’s some kind of religious thing, he figures, from its resemblance to a couple of the old photographs in the Legacy. An androgynous figure in long robes, who might be an angel or a saint or something else completely, a nimbus of gold around its head. No light creeps in around the picture’s edges. If you didn’t know there was a screen behind it, you’d never guess.

He looks at Cas. “You really never saw the outside before you let me in here,” he says, shaking his head.

“No,” Cas says, and turns to look at him. “Thank you,” he says.

“What for?”

Cas takes his hand, leans in toward him, eyes wide and shining in the dark. He opens his mouth to speak.

And they hear footsteps.

They both freeze where they stand.

Cas jerks his head towards the storage closet, where Dean hid out the first day he got here. They manage to jam themselves inside as the footsteps approach. Dean holds the door shut with both hands and does the best he can to slow his breathing.

The footsteps have reached the canteen, now. They get closer. Stop just outside the door.

Dean can hear whoever it is breathing, hard. They must have run the last couple flights, at least.

“Castiel,” a voice hisses, then. Anna’s voice.

Dean turns to look at Cas, sees him wide-eyed in the dark.

 _She supposed to be up here?_ he mouths, and Cas shakes his head in reply.

“Cas,” Anna says, again. “Dean. You have to go. _Now_.”

They share a glance, and Dean cracks open the door. Anna’s alone, and her whole body sags with relief when she catches sight of them.

“What’s happened?” Cas asks, as he steps out from the storeroom.

“It’s Gabriel.” Anna sighs. “You know he’s seemed off, lately. They hauled him into Confession last night. I think he must have let something slip.”

Cas frowns. “It isn’t like him.”

Anna closes her eyes, and Dean recognises her expression too well. She’s obviously at the end of her rope. “Yes, well, he isn’t acting like himself anymore.” She straightens, then, makes for the airlock door, suddenly businesslike, and jams down the button to open it. The door shudders and begins to rise. “Anyway. The point is, Naomi knows something’s going on. So, right now? Dean needs to get out of here before somebody decides to look up top, and we—” She jerks her thumb to indicate herself and Cas. “—need to make ourselves scarce.”

“Fuck,” Dean mutters. “Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.”

Cas takes his hand, and he falls silent, turning to look at Cas’s face. He’s grave, still, but he strokes a thumb over the back of Dean’s hand.

Dean picks up his pack, hefts it over his shoulder and heads for the airlock. Cas follows.

They work quickly, on autopilot, getting Dean into the cleaning suit, flashlight and radio tucked into the inside pockets. Dean feels something crinkle in one of his coverall pockets, and remembers he still has the drawing from this morning stuffed in there. The memory of Cas’s shoulder pressed against his own, the way his body still aches from last night, the fact that he’ll never be alone with Cas again—all of it hits him like a punch in the gut, and he stops dead, the helmet of the cleaning suit held in his hands.

“Cas,” he says, and then doesn’t know what else to say. Cas was never supposed to land in the shit because of him, but _I’m sorry_ and _thank you_ both seem pathetically inadequate.

Cas lays a hand over one of his own. “It’s okay,” he says, even though it really, really isn’t. And then, “I love you.”

Fuck. Dean might never hear him say it again, and if he can’t say it back this once, then maybe he doesn’t deserve to.

“I know, Cas,” he says, and swallows hard. “I love you, too.”

His voice catches in his throat, but Cas hears him. For a moment, Cas just looks at him, wondering.

Anna hisses, “Hurry!” from outside the airlock, and the moment shatters.

Cas is plucking the helmet out of Dean’s hands, then; settling it over his head; stepping out the airlock door, his fingers catching Dean’s and lingering there for just a second. Just one more second.

The inner door shudders, starts to descend. Dean think he can hear footsteps. He thinks so, but through the cleaning suit he can’t tell, and his heart races and he’s frozen to the spot, staring.

The last thing he sees through the door is Cas.

Anna’s a shadowy figure in the dark of the cafeteria, but Cas, he sees clear as day. The viewscreen is right behind him, so it looks like he’s the saint with the painted halo. Only Cas is real, all unkempt hair and big, tired eyes and unwavering love. And then the door closes and he’s gone, and the absence of him is real, too, a great gaping hole ripped through the fabric of Dean’s self.

Dean feels like he’s turned to stone. He might never be able to move from this spot.

But the outer door is rising, and there’s wasteland and howling wind before him, and it’s move or die, so he moves.

 

 

 

 

Up the ramp, into the tearing wind, into dust and bare rock.

Dean can see it all, this time.

Good.

Seen with clear eyes, the landscape doesn’t pretend to be forgiving. It’s honest about its kills, leaves their bones stripped bare and scattered. They look like a divination, but not one that makes promises of good fortune. One whose only smile is a skeleton grin.

The wind has scoured away Dean’s footprints, and he only has memory to rely on to get him to the right spot on the bank. He narrows his eyes, trying to bring his last journey _outside_ into focus. He stumbled down the bank, jolted to the left. But how far?

However hard he tries, the memory’s blurred. There were other things on his mind, at the time. The pain of his injured knee; the hopelessness; the disbelief that took hold of him when he saw another silo right here, and that made everything feel not-real. Out here, it’s all greyness and rubble. It all looks the same.

Dean stumbles to a halt and closes his eyes in despair. It’s all been for nothing. He left Cas behind and it’s all been for nothing.

He raises his eyes to the sky, blinking back tears of rage.

He never looked up, last time he was _outside_. If he’s gonna go out, he wants a glimpse of what’s up there first. Wants to know what Sammy thought was so special.

The sky is as grey as the earth, early light seeping up over the edge of the bank and bleeding into the end of the night. Grey light and dust in the wind. That’s all there is.

And then Dean sees it. The pale gleam of a star, one last hanger-on in the early morning. Sam’s star. The Pole Star.

The Ancients used it to navigate by, across their great expanses of land and water. Dean thinks about the map that’s tucked into the pocket of his coverall. If that’s North, then—yes. He has a way home.

Dean grits his teeth, and he turns his back, puts the Pole Star behind him, and starts to scramble up the bank.

He makes it to the top. The cleaning suit is holding up pretty well. He can still breathe okay, and his eyes aren’t stinging. He feels like he could just keep walking.

He finds the next bank and looks down. The door to his silo is there, below him. But his gaze lands on a lump at the bottom of the bank and he loses his breath, almost loses his footing, too. He sees the torn fabric of a cleaning suit flapping in the wind like a broken wing and he looks away, bile rising in his throat.

The outside world is honest about its kills. That doesn’t mean Dean can stand to look at all of them.

He inches along the top of the bank, until he finds another place to climb down. Keeps his eyes fixed on the ramp at the bottom of the basin, the one that leads to the airlock door. Even when the loose earth slips under him, sends him skidding until he catches himself against the bank with a bruising thud, he doesn’t look down.

Sammy. He thinks about Sam, Bobby, Jess: the family who are still breathing. The ones he might be able to help, if he just gets to them in time.

Dean slides the last couple feet down the bank, stumbles forward and rights himself. Eyes still on the door. It’s closed. He trudges forward, leaning into the wind. From here, he can see that the bank rises up in a circle, all the way around the ramp. It must reach around the circumference of the silo itself.

The Ancients moved the earth, built all of this, just to keep the silos out of sight of one another. Just to keep the people living in them in line.

Dean makes it to the top of the ramp. The door is still closed when he gets there, and a sick feeling starts to work its way up from his gut, his brain racing through all the ways this could possibly have gone wrong. Walker arrested Sam before he could get to Ruby. Ruby didn’t take the bait. They overestimated how many people in the silo were onside, and they were overwhelmed before they ever made it to the up tops.

There were so many ways for this to fuck up. How did they ever convince themselves it was gonna work?

He makes it, slides the last couple strides down the ramp, stopping himself with his gloved hands flat against the still-closed door. It doesn’t move, and he couldn’t hear the mechanism if it did, between the helmet on his head and the wind still howling up above.

Dean raises his fist, brings it down desperately against the outer door. The sound is swallowed up, out here; he can’t tell whether anybody inside would’ve been able to hear it. He does it again. Again.

Nothing. He raises his fist again, despair already hollowing out a space for itself inside his chest cavity.

The door judders. Begins to rise.

It’s slow, agonisingly slow, but after a moment that feels like hours, it’s open far enough for Dean to duck underneath and roll into the airlock. The door clanks to a stop, reversing its ascent. Dean lies flat on his back in the airlock, gasping for breath, winded not so much by the walk over wasteland, but by the reality of it. The fact that he’s back here.

He’s home.

After a couple moments lying flat on his back, Dean levers himself to his feet. He strips off the cleaning suit, retrieving his radio from the inside pocket, and raps on the inner door. The mechanism comes to life with a metallic clank.

The door rises, slowly, way too fucking slowly.

And then—then, it’s open and they’re all standing there. Sam and Jess and Jody, and a stunned-looking Ruby. She steps back against the cafeteria wall as the noise from the assembled crowd rises.

Fuck, there are so many people here. More people than Dean’s seen in a long time, let alone had staring at him all together. The uncomfortable memory of last time he was here sucks him down. The noise of the crowd, like water bursting forth from a ruptured pipe. He can’t fucking breathe, he’s drowning in a sea of eyes—

Sam takes a step forward, pulling him into a bone-crushing hug.

“You made it,” Sam says, his voice full of wonder. “You _made it_.”

It all fades: the crowd staring at them, the ache of loss in his chest. Just for a moment, it all goes away. Dean closes his eyes and holds on.

“They’re lying to you!”

Ruby’s voice cuts into Dean’s consciousness, high and clear above the noise of the crowd. Clear—but with an edge in it that sounds like panic.

Sam breaks the hug, steps back from Dean to stare at her.

“They’re lying!” she insists. “I don’t know how these crazies pulled it off, but this is a set-up.” She turns to glare at Sam. “They lied to me, and now they’re lying to you. There’s no way somebody could come back from out there.”

Dean rounds on her. “ _You_ sent me out there,” he says. “You sent me out there to die. And now you’re trying to deny responsibility? Fuck that. Seriously, fuck it from every direction.”

“There’s no way somebody could’ve survived out there?” Sam cuts in. “But we all saw Dean go _outside_. We saw him climb up the bank. You’re saying what we saw on the viewscreen—that was a lie?”

Ruby obviously sees where he’s going with this, and she narrows her eyes at him. “Perhaps you rigged it up,” she suggests. “Perhaps I trusted you too well.”

“Trusted me enough to keep me a prisoner?” Sam stares her down. “You told me the truth, and you locked me away because you were afraid I was gonna share it. You didn’t let me out until you thought you’d gotten me brainwashed.”

“Sam.” Ruby’s voice turns soft, conciliatory. She’s bringing out every trick in the book: yeah, she’s shit-your-pants scared. “I know the training can be stressful. You can’t be blamed for getting a little—detached from reality. But tricks like this—they aren’t the way forward.”

“Give it up, Ruby,” Dean says. “I’ve been _outside_. I spent the last couple months in one of the other silos.”

The noise of the crowd kicks up a notch, a wondering murmur. The expression of disbelief that crosses Ruby’s face comes a split second too late, but she struggles gamely to keep up the charade. “There’s no such thing!” she says. “That’s impossible.”

“Yeah?” Dean reaches into his coverall pocket, pulls out the sheet of paper Cas gave him that morning. “Then tell me, where did I get this?”

Her eyes widen comically as they land on it. “You can’t have that,” she breathes, and for a moment she just stares. Then she remembers herself, turns back to the crowd. “That doesn’t mean anything,” she says. “They’re delusional. They’re all delusional.”

Sam takes a step in front of her. “Tell you what,” he says. “Why don’t we let the people here decide who they believe? If they want to hear what Dean has to say?” He’s speaking to the crowd more than he’s speaking to Ruby, and he turns his hands palms up, an inviting gesture. “If you believe us,” he says, “if you want to hear the truth—we’ll tell you. All you have to do is ask.”

It’s a risk, Dean thinks. Just because the silo is sick of Ruby’s regime, that doesn’t mean they’re gonna believe some nutso story about other silos and secret authorities.

The moment of silence that follows Sam’s announcement stretches out, the nervous shuffle of feet and the clearing of throats the only sound in the crowded cafeteria.

Then, somebody steps forward.

It’s a short, red-haired woman—in IT white, which surprises Dean at first. Then he recognises her. It’s Jess’s friend, the one he spoke to all that time ago. Charlie. She avoids Ruby’s eyes, but when she raises her head to speak, her voice is steady.

“I want to know,” she says. “I know Jess, and I know Sam—well, kind of—and they’ve got no reason to lie to us.” Her eyes land briefly on Dean. “I believe you.”

Movement in the crowd, and somebody else steps forward. “I had those boys in my class from infants, and I never taught them to lie.” A stout, middle-aged woman whose tone brooks no argument. Ms Moseley. Dean stares, and she meets his eyes with the exact same warning look that meant he was about to get an ass-kicking if he hadn’t done his homework. _I’m taking a chance on you_ , it says. _Don’t let me down_. She nods. “I believe you.”

“I want to know.” It’s Doctor Tran’s son. What was his name? Kevin? “My Mom thinks you guys are legit, and trust me, she can smell bullshit at fifty paces.” He gives a tiny grin. “I believe you.”

“I believe you.”

Another voice, and another, and another, and the chorus reaches around the room. Ruby’s defiance falls from her face in a defeated slump. But everywhere else—it’s like the silo is waking up, all the lights coming on at once.

“I believe you.”

It’s _hope_.

“I believe you.”

Dean lets out a slow breath, feels Sam clap him on the shoulder.

He just wishes Cas was here to see this. To see that they’ve done something right.

 

 

 

 

The day passes in a blur. One minute Dean’s relaying his story for the nth time to somebody who didn’t catch it the first time round; the next, he’s fielding questions about _what else is out there_ or _what do we do now_ (to which he doesn’t have much answer except, ‘What do _you_ think?’), listening to an apology or a complaint.

Some of the people who come to speak to him have this weird, starry-eyed look about them, like they think he’s some kind of a saviour. Dean gets out of those conversations as fast as he can.

All the people. The volume of voices, after so long in the quiet and the dark. Before long, Dean’s head is pounding, his eyes sore from the light, the endless questions ringing in his ears. He has to get out of here.

He excuses himself, sometime early in the afternoon, on the pretext of going to the men’s room. Doesn’t have much idea where he’s going, except for away, but he ends up in the currently-empty Sheriff’s office.

Quiet here. Dean starts to feel like he can breathe again.

It’s only when he’s gotten his breath back and his head together that he starts to notice the things that are different. Gun oil out on the desk. Dean prods at the keyboard of the nearest computer, and the monitor blinks to life, names scrolling down the screen. It takes him a moment to register what they are, because there are so damn many of them, but when he figures it out, he feels a little sick. Arrest records.

A tap at the door. Dean frowns and cracks it open, blinking in surprise when Jody’s face appears in the gap. He steps back to let her in.

“Winchester,” she says, with a sad little smile. “I was a part of this, you know. I wanna apologise.”

Dean shakes his head. “You don’t gotta do that, Jody. You spoke up for me, you woulda been next out the door.”

“Maybe I don’t have to,” she says, with steady eyes, “but I want to.”

Dean can’t really answer that, so he just lets Jody pull him into a hug.

It’s then that they hear a noise.

No: a voice. From the direction of the cells.

Jody steps back. They exchange looks, wary. She nods, and Dean steps forward to open the door.

It’s dark in the corridor. Walker and the other Security people were out of here at dawn, so of course nobody thought to turn on the lights. That’s if Walker bothered to take care of his prisoners at all.

There’s nobody in the first cell. But, peering through the bars, Dean can see that there are cuffs attached to the wall. He winces. Whether that was Walker’s idea or Ruby’s, it makes him hate them both that little bit more.

“Hey.” The voice is faint, thready, coming from the far end of the corridor. “Who is it? What’s happening?”

Dean makes his way towards it. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay, Walker’s gone, we’re gonna get you outta here.”

“Dean?” the voice says, stronger this time. “I thought you were dead.”

He reaches the final cell and just stares. “ _Jo?_ ”

 

 

 

 

Jody’s already found the keys, and within a couple minutes, they’ve gotten Jo out of the cell. She’s pale, dark circles under her eyes, a fading bruise on one cheekbone. She sits in Dad’s old chair, rubbing at her wrists, while Jody makes her coffee.

“What happened?” Dean asks.

Jo looks at him. “What do you _think_ happened?” she says, flatly, and he falls silent.

Jody rifles in a desk drawer while Jo and Dean drink their coffee in silence. She frowns, then pounces on something with a triumphant, “There you are,” holding something small and shiny out to Jo. “Master key,” she says. “Should let you back into your quarters. I’ll warn you, though, they might’ve gotten trashed.”

Jo makes a face. “I figured.”

“I have some things you can wear, if they have,” Jody goes on. “They’ll be a little big on you, but they’re clean.”

“Thanks.” Jo gets to her feet, setting down her empty mug and stretching until Dean hears her bones crack. “I’ll take you up on that. _God_ , I can’t wait to take a shower.”

Dean stands up alongside her. “Walk you to your quarters?”

Jo hesitates a second before she turns to look at him, her mouth set firmly. “No thanks,” she says. She looks in his eyes. “Don’t get me wrong—I know you were set up. I don’t blame you for that. But still, no.”

It hurts more than he expects it to. Dean hasn’t ever stopped wondering—whether Ellen, and all those people he didn’t know, would still be alive, if he’d just stayed in the down deeps instead of snooping. They weigh heavy on his conscience, even though, logically, he knows it’s Ruby and the crazies who blew themselves up who deserve the blame. He didn’t think that hearing somebody else felt that way would be such a punch in the gut.

He’s gotten used to reassurance, he guesses. He’s gotten used to Cas.

Well, he’s gonna have to get un-used to it. Jo doesn’t owe him shit. Neither does anybody else who’s lost a loved one in this mess.

“I get it,” he says.

Jody gives him an understanding look before she turns to shepherd Jo out of the office. Dean listens to their footsteps as they recede down the corridor.

 

 

 

 

Rufus doesn’t apologise like Jody did. Dean figures that isn’t his way. But he nods, looks Dean in the eyes and says, “Yeah, guess I believe you,” and that’s about as close to a declaration of faith the guy gets.

Dean will take it. Between the wide-eyed declarations of people he’s never met before, and the quiet way Jo stepped back from him, he doesn’t really know where he stands. Right now, he’ll take any reaction that falls in the middle, thanks very much.

 

 

 

 

By the time it’s just Dean, Sam, and Jess, back in his temporary quarters up top—stripped bare; IT must have taken most of his stuff—Dean’s scrubbing at his eyes with exhaustion.

Ruby’s locked in her quarters, Rufus, and a couple others rotating guard duty on the door. It’s for her own protection as much as anything. The silo would be happy to see her head on a stick, and while Dean gets the sentiment—oh, he _really_ gets it—sinking to her level? Not gonna happen. She can sit and stew and watch her regime be dismantled. She can find out what it’s like to be helpless, for once.

They carry down cups of wince-inducingly strong black coffee from the cafeteria, and they arrange themselves around the table in tired silence. Dean props his head up on his hands.

“Okay,” Sam says. “So, Jody’s in charge up here for now. Dean, you think you’d be up for having your old job back?”

It makes sense. Dean knows that. He’s the guy who came back from _outside_. He’s the one people will be looking at as proof of the old regime’s corruption, as proof that truth will out. Like it or not, he’s a symbol.

But he shakes his head. “I gotta go to the down deeps first,” he tells Sam. “There’s something I need to check out.”

Sam frowns and looks like he’s about to argue, but whatever he sees in Dean’s expression shuts him up.

Dean doesn’t know what it is. He only knows that it’s Cas he’s thinking of as he says it. Cas, saying that he knows Dean isn’t meant to be trapped underground, and meaning _goodbye_.

How much he wants to believe that there’s a way out. To prove something. To himself; to Cas, who probably won’t ever even know.

He doesn’t get time to guard himself against the thought, and now it’s here, in his head, and he can’t shake it. He probably won’t ever speak to Cas again. If those really were footsteps on the stairs this morning, then who knows what’s happened to Cas by now?

It doesn’t feel real. Cas, just gone from his world, not even a voice on the radio anymore? Cas suffering, locked up in some cell—or dying, rotting under the soil in the mids in his silo—and Dean not even knowing about it, not being able to do a thing?

It can’t be real.

But later—when Sam and Jess are gone, when he’s done counting down the hours until Cas would normally start his shift, done forcing himself to wait—Dean switches on his radio and listens, and the airwaves are silent.

He gets up from his chair, eventually, strips down to his t-shirt and boxers ready for bed. He leaves the radio on, but it still feels like giving up.

In the mirror, he can still see the marks Cas left on him, peeking out from the neck of his t-shirt. He still aches from Cas fucking him—the good kind of ache, not the kind that comes from weeks spent hunched over reading and working in the dark. Dean wants to believe it’ll stay forever—that somehow, Cas has done something to him on a molecular level, remade him new and different, left a mark on him that won’t ever be erased.

He wants to believe it. But the bruises will fade and the ache will disappear, and soon all he’ll have left of Cas are memories and a single sheet of paper.

Dean crawls under the covers and buries his face in his pillow. He’s tired enough that, eventually, sleep takes him.


	18. Chapter 18

 

He’s drowning.

He knows, in an abstract kind of a way, that this is a dream. He’s had it before.

Only this time, there’s no Ruby, and Cas isn’t in the water with him. He’s up on the surface with Sam, both of them reaching down, offering hands to haul Dean up. They aren’t so far away. Dean kicks up towards them, stretching his arms out to meet them.

But when he gets close, their hands dig hooks into his heart and pull in opposite directions. They’re trying to rip him apart down the middle. Only there’s no malice on their faces, no anger. Just open, honest confusion. It’s like they don’t even see each other.

Dean thrashes wildly, and the hooks burrow in deeper and his blood clouds the water like ink.

They don’t seem to notice. _I’ve got you_ , they say, separately, in sync. _Come on, Dean, it’s okay. I’ve got you._

He wakes up shaking, to the flat hiss of the radio.

 

 

 

 

Sam and Jess are awake early in the morning, too, all of them still too keyed up from the day before to get much shut-eye. Dean loads up on coffee and breakfast— _real food_ , not tasteless nutrient bars, and apparently there isn’t a level of misery in the world that can keep him from appreciating that—and says his goodbyes to them before the rest of the silo wakes up and gets to work.

Sam and Jody can handle things up here; Dean’s pretty sure of that. He hasn’t had time to get used to being around so many people again all of a sudden, and he wants to get going while the staircase is still quiet. He actually finds that he’s looking forward to the climb to the down deeps. It’ll help clear his head, stretch out his legs after weeks hiding away in the dark.

Plus, it’s selfish and destructive and dumb and he knows it, but he wants some time alone with his sadness. He could tell Sam and Jess about Cas, and they’d try to understand, and they’d try to make him feel better. He knows that. It’s just that he doesn’t want to feel better about this. It’d be a betrayal.

So he packs up and start climbing. It’s early enough that there’s hardly anybody around, just like Dean wanted. He gets a couple curious looks from early risers heading up to the cafeteria, the first few nightshift workers on their way home, but it isn’t until he’s down past IT that the stairway traffic starts to build up, and people start calling out to him.

“Hey!” one voice calls. “Winchester! Deputy!”

It’s weird, hearing his old job title, because Dean never really had the time to start thinking of himself by it. But he turns anyway, and a guy whose name he doesn’t know raises a hand in greeting.

“You’re the guy!” says another voice, at his elbow. He turns and finds a young shadow in a porter’s coverall staring at him. “You’re the guy who went _outside_.”

Dean finds his voice. No hiding from it now. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, that’s me.”

The shadow looks up at him with wide, amazed eyes. “Tell us what happened!”

The information seems to pass down the stairway in a ripple, spiralling away towards the down deeps, and soon there are voices calling up from the next landing.

“Tell us!” they say. “Tell us what’s out there! Tell us!”

There are so many voices, so many eyes on him, and Dean has to steady himself on the stair rail and close his eyes for a moment before he can face them. He takes slow breaths.

 _They deserve to know_ , he tells himself. _We did the right thing. A right thing, anyway. Telling them, that’s the right thing._

“Okay,” he says, once he’s gotten himself together. He holds his hands out a little way in front of him, the crowd pressing in close. “Just—lemme get to the landing, okay? We’re gonna block up the stairs.”

Nobody actually shows much inclination to push through the crowd and get to wherever they’re going. One of the consequences of a regime change, Dean guesses—makes everybody feel like they’re on holiday. But his warning seems to work, and Dean finds a path being cleared for him down the stairs. People trail behind him, the young shadow who asked him to tell the story first in line. Dean feels like the guy in that story Ms Moseley used to tell in school, with the rats and the kids.

He doesn’t like it one bit, but it seems like there’s no getting away from it. Right now, he feels as trapped as he ever did hiding out in Cas’s silo.

There’s a water station on the landing, and someone shoves a fresh canteen into his hands. Dean can’t see who it was in the crowd, so he throws a vague, “Uh, thanks?” in the direction it came from and hopes that’s enough.

He takes a swig, sets it down, and there’s silence all around him. A sea of staring faces, and suddenly he feels like he’s drowning all over again.

He clears his throat. “Okay,” he says. “Uh, yeah. I guess you want to know if I’ve been _outside_. The answer’s yes. And it’s pretty fu— pretty damn hairy up there, just like it looks on the viewscreen. So you probably wanna know how I made it back alive.” He swallows, closes his eyes again for a moment, against the throb of pain in his chest. “It’s a long story, and I’ll tell you. But basically, somebody saved me.”

 

 

 

 

It happens again, a few levels down, and again, and by the time he reaches the mids that evening, Dean’s starting to feel like a one-man travelling show. He hasn’t gotten as far as he’d hoped to, today, and he’s exhausted.

Not that he’s ungrateful. Having the silo mostly onside and willing to believe him isn’t something he ever let himself imagine, before. And a couple months ago, he probably would’ve been bitter about it; hated the people asking to hear his side for their fickleness, for listening to him now that it’s safe, when they let Dad go to cleaning. Now, though, he lets himself believe it’s worth something—even if it might just be because he has to believe that or go crazy.

He’s tired, though. Each iteration of the story feels like peeling off another layer of himself, handing it out to be divided amongst the crowd. Dean comes to a stop on the level where Pam lives feeling threadbare. He holds his hand out in front of his face and is a little surprised that he can’t just see right through it.

The barricade that divided off the bottom half of the silo was a couple levels up from here, and Dean saw it being dismantled as he passed through. The landings below are still littered with the evidence of people camping out here. People who’d come up from the down deeps to hold the line—and those who’d fled down from the up tops, like Sam and Jess. Most of them have packed and left already, heading back to investigate what’s become of their homes as the news trickles down through the silo. Just a few stragglers remain, picking up their things and exchanging goodbyes before they head up or down. Dean scans the faces, but doesn’t find anybody he knows.

He hesitates before he heads on over to Pam’s plot, not knowing what he’s gonna find there. From what he saw up top, he doubts there’s been much time for rebuilding down here, either.

Pam wasn’t exactly happy to see him, last time. He won’t be able to blame her if she’s still pissed.

But he takes a deep breath, and he goes over.

It looks better than he expected. The whole place does, actually. The damaged equipment has mostly been hauled away and piled up in corners, and the soil is neat, markers showing where the owners have planted new crops. Pam’s corner is the same—plus, it’s been cleaned up, the graffiti that made Dean feel like punching somebody last time he was here scrubbed out.

Pam’s crouching over something, her back to him, when he approaches. She uncoils upright at the sound of his footsteps, turns—and, thank Christ, she’s smiling.

Not the kind of bright, unreserved smile she might have turned on him once. But a smile, and that’s more than he dared to expect.

“The prodigal returns,” she says, cocking an eyebrow, and yeah, Dean never will figure out how she does that.

“Nah,” he says. “That was always Sammy, not me.”

Pam cocks an eyebrow, at that. “You’re different,” she says, and then pulls him into a hug.

Dean doesn’t know what to say to that, so he just hugs back and brushes it off with, “Yeah, people listen to me now. When did people around here start growing brains, anyway?”

She swats him on the ass and releases him, still smiling. But her smile fades as she speaks. “It isn’t over,” she says. “You know that, right?”

Dean shifts from one foot to the other, uneasy. Maybe it’s just Pam’s freaky-ass way of reading situations—she knows more about what’s going on down here than he does, after all—but it feels like it’s his mind she’s reading.

“Yeah,” is all he says, though. He sighs. “Yeah, I know.”

 

 

 

 

Dean sleeps better on a makeshift bed on Pam’s floor than he did in his old quarters last night, which says something about what he’s gotten used to. There’s still no word from Cas.

The next day is more of the same. By the time he shows up in the down deeps, Dean’s footsore and hoarse, and he really wants to crawl away and hide out in a darkened room where he won’t have to deal with any more worshipful eyes, with telling his story over and over until it doesn’t feel like it belongs to him anymore.

Bobby’s workshop is about the next best thing. When Benny slaps him on the back and envelops him in a bear-hug, and Bobby wheels over with a bottle of something strongly alcoholic and a gruff-voiced complaint about _taking your own sweet time to get down here, idiot_ , it feels as much like being home as seeing Sam again did.

For all that he’s fucking exhausted, they end up talking late into the night. Dean has to relay the whole story all over again, sure, but he doesn’t mind it so much, this time. These are his friends. It’s him they’re listening to, not some imagined saviour.

He leaves out the parts about him and Cas being—well, whatever it was they were—but something of it must show on his face, because when he gets to the end, Bobby sets down his drink and crosses his arms and says, “So, this Castiel character. What was he like?”

Dean blinks in surprise, because it’s the first time somebody’s done that—talked to him like Cas is an actual person, not just a thing that happened to Dean. He looks down, thumbing the rim of his own glass, before he answers.

“Pretty weird,” he says, at last, with a small smile. “Growing up somewhere like that—gotta screw with your head, right? But Cas—he was—he’s _good_. He really gives a crap.”

Bobby nods. “Like you,” he says. “Took a dumb risk to save your ass. Guess we gotta be grateful to him.”

Dean snorts—a reflex—and stares into his drink, and Bobby doesn’t push the subject any further. They’ve both about reached their limit for deep and meaningful conversation. But weirdly, just being able to mention Cas like that—it doesn’t feel bad.

It undoes some of the wearing effect of the last dozen times he’s told the story. Dean feels like he’s been given back a piece of himself.

“Still ain’t answered the hundred-chit question, though,” Bobby says, changing the subject before Dean can get hung up on it. He jerks his head up at the ceiling. “It’s all happening up top. So what are you doing down here?”

“Huh.” Dean smiles a little, back on familiar ground.

Okay, so he’s about to try and talk Bobby round to a crazy-sounding idea, but he’s done that dozens of times. He gets up, walks to the workshop door and points down the corridor, at the curved sides of Mechanical.

Bobby joins him, giving him a _what the hell_ look through narrowed eyes, and Benny turns his chair to watch.

“What you looking at, boy?” Bobby demands.

Dean looks at him. “I wanna knock a hole in that wall.”

Bobby stares at him. “You lose your mind over there?”

“Nope.” Dean digs in the pocket of his coverall, pulls out Cas’s drawing, and unfolds it. “I found an idea.”

 

 

 

 

“No way in hell,” Bobby says, arms crossed, when Dean’s done with his explanation. Cas’s drawing is spread out on his worktable, and Dean and Benny stand on either side of him, poring over it.

Dean looks at him. “So, do I get a reason, or is that it?”

“Where d’you want me to start, boy? You’re talking about knocking a hole in the silo wall, no clue where it goes, and what you got to go on? Something you heard from one of the bastards _running_ this screwed-up show?” Bobby shakes his head. “It’s risky. Bracing the wall—that’s work. It’d take more workers than we got down here to carry this thing off, and we gotta keep the generator running alongside the whole time.”

“It ain’t impossible,” Benny offers. “If we called in some help. Seems our boy’s gotten himself a regular following. I’m guessing people would help out, if he asked.”

Bobby glares up at him. “I’m still the head of this section, Lafitte,” he says. “And I say it’s a damn fool idea and we can’t work it.”

“Bobby, man—” Dean starts, and Bobby turns to jab a finger at him.

“I’m happy to see you, Dean,” he says. “I ain’t had a lobotomy. Now drop it.”

There’s a tremor in his voice that nobody comments on. Dean drops it.

 

 

 

 

He doesn’t sleep well, that night.

Dean’s spent enough nights on the beat-up old couch in Bobby’s workshop that he’s worn an imprint into the cushions, but somehow he can’t get comfy. He leaves the radio on—doesn’t exactly matter now, if Bobby hears it—and when he finally gives up on sleep sometime in the small hours, he pours himself another shot of liquor and sits at the table with it, head propped up on his hands.

“Cas, man,” he says, softly, into the quiet. “I know you can’t hear me. I know you’re—maybe you’re not even out there at all.” He swallows. “But I’m not gonna give up. ‘M gonna keep trying. Find out what’s out there. What else am I gonna do?”

The radio hisses back at him. It’s been his background noise for so long, now—here, and in Cas’s silo. If he just shuts his eyes, he can picture the bedroll, his few belongings arranged around the storage locker. Cas’s profile, next to him; Cas’s shoulder pressed against his own.

“You’d say that was the right thing, wouldn’t you? I’m pretty sure you would.” Dean sighs. “I think you would.”

The silence is broken by a noise behind him, a _clunk_ and then a hissed, “Dammit!”

Dean turns his head. “Bobby?”

He’s in the doorway. There was a stack of panelling against the wall next to it; now half of the sheets are on the floor.

Dean gets up to retrieve them. “Couldn’t sleep either, huh?”

An annoyed huff is all the answer he gets. Bobby manoeuvres past him and pours himself another measure of booze.

When he’s taken a drink, he turns to look at Dean. “It ain’t just about seeing what’s out there, is it?” he says. There’s something heavy in his expression, his earlier vehemence all drained away.

Dean piles the panels back up by the door, looks at his hands as he does it. “Guess not,” he admits, after a moment. He pauses. “It ain’t just about the manpower, is it?”

“Sometimes I forget you ain’t as dumb as you look.” Bobby’s eyes are distant, though. Dean wonders what he’s seeing. Karen, maybe. Maybe one last chance to save somebody he cares about from themselves.

“Not just a pretty face,” Dean says, automatically, with a smirk that hasn’t felt natural on his face in months.

Bobby sighs, his frown deepening. “We’ll put the call out tomorrow,” he says.

Dean actually double-takes. “What now?”

“You heard me.” Bobby swallows the last of his drink. “This goes south, it’s coming out of your ass, you hear me?”

Dean raises his glass. “Loud and clear, Bobby.”

He doesn’t sleep the rest of that night, either. But the feeling fizzing in his chest is more than fear.

 

 

 

 

They take their time, figure out the best place to drill over the course of the next week and do it properly. If there is some great hole in the earth out there, they don’t want half of Mechanical collapsing into it.

Word gets around quick, once the call for workers goes out. By the time they’re ready to get started, even people on their days off are hanging around to watch. There’s a tension in the air, and honestly, Dean can’t even begin to imagine what the crowd is thinking.

He hasn’t heard anybody question the idea, and he isn’t sure whether that’s because it has Bobby’s say-so, or because of the weird unofficial authority that seems to have stuck to him since he came back, as though going _outside_ has changed him in some fundamental way. There are still people who look at Dean like he’s the goddamn Messiah, and it still gives him the creeps.

It’s a big part of why he hasn’t exactly mingled, since he got back to Mechanical—though the lingering culture-shock of coming back to a populated silo after his weeks hiding out hasn’t exactly helped. The people here, even the ones Dean thought he knew pretty well, treat him like he isn’t one of them anymore—and they’re right, really. Since he left for the up tops, he’s been living in a different world. They aren’t hostile, they mostly don’t ask their questions outright, but he can feel the distance when they speak to him—like there’s a layer of unreality colouring all their perceptions of him. He sticks mostly to the company of Bobby and Benny and a couple others—plus the voiceless hiss of his radio, late into the night.

Right now, there’s more than one creepy-expectant look being directed Dean’s way. He turns his back on them, concentrating on the spot in the wall where they’re about to start drilling, but he can feel them, an itch burrowing under the surface of his skin.

The drill bites, starts making its way through the wall. Dean follows it with his eyes, willing something to happen.

As the drill works through, the sound of the vibration changes. Something hollow in it. The others are hearing it, too. Dean sees glances exchanged, eyes widening, and he feels his heart beat faster, and he allows himself to hope. He clenches his hands into fists, fingernails biting into his palms.

The drill breaks through. It’s almost like the wall was designed to give way in this one place, because Deam knows the silo wall is thicker, most of the way around. But he doesn’t have time to dwell on the thought, because then Benny’s peering through the gap and waving him over, and it’s what’s on the other side that really stuns him.

“Brother,” Benny says, once Dean’s taken a look. “You’re seeing this, right? It ain’t just my imagination?”

Dean lets out a breath. “Damn right it isn’t.”

“What’s going on over there?” Bobby. The crowd parts to let him through, and he comes to a halt beside them. “Well?”

Dean shakes his head, exchanges a bewildered look with Benny. “Don’t know,” he says. “We’re gonna have to break through. But out there—it’s some kind of a machine.”

 

 

 

 

It’s slow work, and Dean takes breaks to radio up to Sam, keeping him up to date on what they’ve found. Sam’s cautious, but Dean can hear the interest in his voice, the undercurrent of excitement. After a couple days, Sam announces he wants to see it for himself, and he and Jess are gonna head to the down deeps to join Dean for a couple days.

People have tried to break into Ruby’s quarters more than once since Dean got back, and they’ve decided moving her further down the silo—at night, so they won’t be seen—is the safest thing. (Tempted as Dean is to say, _let them have her_ , he holds his tongue.) They’re heading down in a couple days, and Sam and Jess will set off with the party and carry on going.

They want to see what Dean’s found. He’s done something his family are proud of. It feels bright and unfamiliar.

Only problem is, it isn’t just Sam he wants to share it with. Cas should know about this. There’s something to what Gabriel’s contact told them, even if they don’t know what yet. And Dean never would have found it if it wasn’t for Cas.

But there’s been no word from him in over a week, and dread has made itself at home in the pit of Dean’s stomach, leaden and cold. He works with it there, eats and breathes and tries to sleep with it there, and does his damn best to hide it from the eyes that keep looking to him for hope.

 

 

 

 

A shout goes up from the drilling site when they open up the wall. Dean’s just done talking to Sam, and he near enough sprints over there, expecting to have to shove his way through the crowd to see what’s going on. He’s a little surprised to find the workers—and the few onlookers who haven’t been chased back to their posts or their quarters by Bobby—hanging back to let him take the first look.

He steps through the hole, moving slow and quiet, so he doesn’t dislodge something and bring the roof of the cavern down on himself.

That’s what it is—a great, dark space, smelling of damp and rust and something dark and mineral that can only be the earth itself. And the machine in it, bigger than he imagined. Dean can’t get a good look at the whole of it from here, but it has wheels, a cabin, a door. It’s almost big enough to live in.

Dean finds the handle and tugs at it, but it won’t open.

“What is it?” comes a voice, from back within Mechanical. “What’s in there?”

Dean pokes his head through the hole. “I don’t know yet,” he says. “C’mon, somebody hand me an oil can. Flashlights. Let’s get this thing open.”

There’s some kind of a control panel, inside the cabin. Benny follows him in there, running his hands over the display in amazement, but Dean gets caught staring out the window at the front of the machine.

It looks like—like some of the pictures from the Legacy, in the chapter on vehicles that he got so fascinated by. The wheels, the attachments on front—it’s supposed to move the earth.

The controls are dead, thick with dust, but Dean finds himself running through the machine’s design in his head, trying to figure out where its power source is. If they could just hook it up to the generator—he’d put chits on being able to get it working.

There’s something on the dashboard that looks like a navigating device, like the pictures of old-style compasses in the Legacy.

This is it, Dean realises. This is the way out.

 

 

 

 

There’s a fucktonne of work to be done before they can even try to move the thing, of course. They need to open up the wall around it, so more than just a couple people at a time can have access. They need to power up the machine, check it over, oil it, figure out how it works. And if they’re able to get it moving—they’re gonna need to brace up the earth as they go, so they don’t just bury themselves right away.

It’s slow going. Days pass, and more days, and there’s still no word from Cas, and slowly Dean’s excitement wears away, replaced by a throb of bitterness that the one person he wants to tell about this the most isn’t around to hear it. Maybe isn’t even in the world anymore.

Dean buries himself in the work. He spends his days in the cavern, his nights snatching sleep on the couch in Bobby’s workshop, with the radio hissing beside his head.

It’s funny, in a grim kind of way, how he’s gotten back to his own silo, doesn’t have to hide anymore, but he’s gone right back to hanging out in the dark.

Okay, so he has something useful to do with his hands, now. The ache of hard work takes him over, works its way into his bones in the nights, there and present and good.

It’s never enough to stop him from remembering the bruises that have faded from his skin, the aches he can’t help missing when he curls up under the blankets at night.

He isn’t alone anymore, either. There are people working all around him, looking to him for instructions—but Dean doesn’t chat idly to his coworkers, like he used to. He sticks to Benny and Bobby and a handful of others he’s known half his life, brief radio conversations with Sam and Jess. People leave him alone, for the most part, sensing that he’s distracted and treading carefully around him. It’s like they’re afraid to poke the bear because they aren’t exactly sure what somebody who’s Come Back might be capable of. That’s how they say it, in hushed voices, somewhere between reverence and fear. Like it isn’t just something that happened to Dean. Like it’s something that changes you.

It’d make him laugh, if he had the stomach for it. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t tell them what is wrong with him. Nothing to do with the _outside_. Nothing that interesting, just a stupid everyday broken heart.

 

 

 

 

They get the digger powered up, they brace the earth around it, and they start digging. Slowly. It could move quicker, only then they’d risk the whole tunnel collapsing in around them.

Dean keeps Cas’s drawing tucked inside the chest pocket of his coverall, pulling it out to consult it for directions. The one time Benny tries to pluck it out of his hand to take a look, Dean snatches it back with a “Fuck you!” that surprises even him with its vehemence.

After that, he makes copies, commandeering scraps of paper and taping them together when he has to, reproducing the drawing painstakingly by hand.

Maybe it’s just a goddamn map, but it’s one thing Cas gave him, one thing Cas touched. One mark Cas made on this world that Dean still has.

More days pass—slowly, still slowly—and the tunnel grows, foot by foot. Dean’s almost gotten used to the routine of it, to ignoring the ache in his chest, to the way people look at him with questions in their eyes but never ask them.

And then—one day around noon, just as Dean’s ducking back through the wall into Mechanical to go hunt for some much-needed coffee, the radio clipped to his belt crackles into life.

He blinks, not daring to believe what he’s hearing, for a moment, then unclips the radio and looks at it.

“Cas?” he says, hesitant. “That you?” It’s barely a whisper, superstitious, like making a wish and not letting anybody else hear it.

Then, though, Dean realises other people are looking at their radios, too. All around the section. Ordinary radios that only use frequencies within the silo.

His pulse quickens as he runs over what this could mean. Ruby’s gotten out, made a break for the server room and found some way to broadcast out onto every radio in the silo? She’s gonna denounce them all as liars or crazies again over the airwaves? That’d be a fucking picnic.

There’s a moment’s pause, and then a voice comes out of the speaker—out of all the speakers, echoing around the section, around the silo.

 _Do I have your attention, silos two through fifty-two?_ it says. _Good. Because I have something important to tell you._


	19. Chapter 19

_ _

 

_You are being lied to._

Gabriel. It’s Gabriel.

 _That’s right_ , he goes on. _I said_ silos, _plural. There’s a whole bunch of us out there, and someone’s been keeping you in the dark. Hi there, Silo One! I know you guys are listening!_

The whole of Mechanical has gone quiet, as people turn to stare at their radios, then at each other, in confusion. Dean can feel the whole silo fall silent, the noise of voices and footsteps falling away, up tops to down deeps, until the radio and its echoes up and down the staircase are all that’s left. It’s like nothing he’s ever heard before, a huge, breathless hush.

 _Yep, that’s right! Of course, some of you already know this—shout-out to Thirty-Four!—but it’s gonna be news to most. I know, I know, it’ll take some getting used to. But, point is, it’s all over now_. Gabriel’s voice turns quiet, wobbles just a little. _No more lies. It’s o—_

A scuffling flurry of noise, and the signal cuts out abruptly.

There’s a moment of silence, heavy, like a droplet of water about to fall. Then the heads start to turn—towards Dean.

“What was that?” comes the first voice, from over the other side of Mechanical.

“Yeah,” comes another. “What the hell?”

Even Benny, who’s moved to stand at Dean’s side, is looking at him curiously. “Any ideas, brother?”

Dean scrubs at the back of his neck, takes a steadying breath. That’s the biggest problem with whatever weird-ass position of power he seems to have fallen into, now. People keep expecting answers from him, even when he really wishes he had none to give.

“Yeah,” he admits, looking up at the assembled faces. “I got an idea. And it ain’t good news.”

But before he can get started on relaying the history of Gabriel-the-suicidal-fuckwit, the radio crackles again. Just his radio, this time.

Dean walks over to it, picks it up, cautiously. “Who is this?”

 _Dean_. It’s Sam’s voice, a low note of urgency in it. _You got all of that, right?_

“Right. Cas’s crazy-ass brother—remember the one I told you about? Guess he’s finally snapped.”

 _Yeah, well, he isn’t the only one in trouble_. Sam hesitates, but only for a second. _Jess is on the radio with Rufus right now. He says Ruby’s going nuts over there. She keeps saying ‘they’re gonna kill us all’. Silo One, I guess she means. And—Dean, if they really did hear that broadcast? I think she might be right._

Dean swallows. He’s already running the scenario through his head—trying to figure out how quickly they can get the digger into the tunnel, how many people can fit through Mechanical at one time, how many people they’ll be able to get out of the silo this way.

He can’t lie. The numbers don’t look good. For a brief, selfish moment, he’s grateful that Sammy and Jess decided to take a trip downstairs. If they were still up top, their chances would be—well, nothing Dean wants to think about.

“Yeah,” he manages. “Yeah, I think you’re right. Cas said—people in the other silos that have gone dark, Silo One killed them. Gas.”

 _How’s that even work?_ Sam asks, after a second.

Dean blinks, trying to work through the logistics in his head. But he’s struck with a memory.

He must’ve been eleven or twelve, Sammy and Jo a couple years younger. Dad was still working in Mechanical, then, but he’d gone to the up tops with Ellen. Back when he was still badgering the Mayor’s office for answers, not realising they didn’t have any.

The kids were left with Bobby, which in practice meant they got to roam around the corridors and the not-too-dangerous areas of Mechanical unsupervised, just so long as they stayed out of trouble. They’d gotten to climbing up the railings, trying to peek through a vent that was just too high for Sammy and Jo to see into, and eventually Jo—the only one of them still small enough to fit—had talked Dean into lifting her up so she could climb in there. She might’ve been small enough to climb _in_ , but when it came to getting back out again, she got stuck. Took near enough an hour for Benny and a couple of the other shadows from Mechanical to get her out.

The ass-kicking they got from Bobby that day still makes Dean wince when he thinks about it now. But later, when the air seemed like it had cleared, he got around to asking, “What does it _do_ , anyway?”

He never got an answer, and at the time he figured it was because Bobby was still mad at him for getting the others in trouble instead of looking after them like he was meant to.

Now, he realises, that wasn’t it. Bobby didn’t know.

With all the years he’s spent working down here, Dean’s never known, either. Only now he’s pretty sure he does.

“The vents,” he says. “The vents in the walls. Cover them up if you can. Then get everybody out of there, into Mechanical. Spread the word. No time to pack up, just move.”

_Okay._

“And Sam? I know you’re only a few levels up from me. If you don’t get your _self_ down here, ASAP? I’ll find you and kill you myself.”

The radio cuts out.

Dean turns. He can hear Bobby barking orders somewhere over the other side of the section, but there are people crowding in around him, too, a questioning murmur rising to a demand, threatening to turn into chaos. He pats his pockets, finds Cas’s drawing and pulls it out.

There’s no way they’ll get to the spot marked on the map—whatever’s there—without the tunnel collapsing in on them. They don’t have time to brace it up right. But Cas’s silo is a lot closer. There has to be a way into the Mechanical section there, just like there’s a way out here.

And the place is huge and almost empty. Cas’s ‘family’ isn’t enough to occupy the whole place. Isn’t enough to keep a silo’s worth of refugees out.

“Okay,” Dean announces. The murmur doesn’t quiet down, and he raises his voice. “Hey! Shut up! This is what we’re doing.”

Silence spreads through the section, and before he starts yelling instructions, Dean snatches up the radio and speaks into it one last time.

“Cas?” he says, too quiet for anyone else to hear. “I dunno if you can hear this. If you’re still out there. But it looks like—we’re coming to you.”

 

 

 

 

It’s weird, but it doesn’t all blur into confusion after that—not right away. It’s a flat, awful clarity; the kind of clarity Dean’s memories of watching Dad go _outside_ have. Welcome to the worst case scenario. There’s no fixing it, so you just gotta do what you can.

Between them, Dean and Bobby get things organised inside Mechanical, getting the vents covered, sending people up to do the same on the next couple levels and to pass the word up the silo, clearing the way downstairs for the people who are gonna come flooding through soon enough.

There’s a noise—first a whisper, then a rumble—from the upper floors. The sound of the silo uprooting itself as its people start to move, rushing frantic down from the upper floors, those lower down ignoring the warnings to stuff belongings into packs, find friends and reassure kids.

Benny heads up the tunnel crew, issuing instructions with the easy calm that seems to come naturally as breathing to him. It’s a comforting sight, even if Dean knows from experience that Benny could be as frantic as the rest of them underneath and he’d still look happy as a clam.

Once he’s reassured that everything’s under control—for whatever loose definition of ‘under control’ they’re working with right now—Dean opens up the cabin of the digger and climbs inside. It’s on a pre-set course, as he discovered when he got the thing working again, but there has to be a way to reset it.

He’ll figure it out. He has to. He spreads out Cas’s drawing, creased from how tight he’s been clutching it, and gets to work.

 

 

 

 

By the time Dean’s gotten the digger reprogrammed, it’s started. The exodus.

There are people trickling into Mechanical, into the space behind the digger. Mostly blue Mechanical overalls, but a few greens from the mids, a couple other colours mixed in. The people standing closest to him are oddly quiet, but there’s a growing hum of conversation from back in the silo. Most of it, worried, urgent, but there are snatches of a different tenor bleeding through.

 _…that crazy on the radio…_ Dean hears _…Ruby…why…believe any of this?..._

Yeah, he should’ve known better than to expect everyone to believe what’s happening. They’re moving, though, borne along by the momentum of people trickling down and out the silo, and that’s what’s important. They don’t need to believe what’s happening. They just need to not die.

They keep moving.

Minutes pass, or hours. Dean can’t be sure. His world has narrowed to the one task in front of him. He doesn’t have his time display with him. It’s back in Bobby’s workshop, which means it’s lost to him forever. Everything he doesn’t have with him right now—he’ll never see it again.

The idea will stun him if he thinks about it too hard, so he doesn’t. But he sees it in the quiet shock of the people passing through the tunnel, the hush of their voices, the way they move as if in a dream. They don’t really feel it yet. It isn’t real yet.

Dean just hopes they’ll survive long enough for it to become real.

He has no idea how long it takes for Silo One to turn on the gas. How many protocols they have to run through, how fast the equipment works. If they’re even gonna do it at all. The waiting keeps him strung up tight. After he passes off the controls of the digger to Benny for a while and heads back to the section to help shepherd people out, he finds himself shifting from foot to foot, moving constantly just to keep from shaking.

When a soft, hissing noise breaks the silence, it’s almost a relief.

Gas.

Dean runs his eyes along the Mechanical wall, and finds the nearest hastily-covered vent—the source of the noise. It’s holding, for now. But there’s no way they’ve gotten to every vent in the silo, and there’s no way the ones they’ve reached will hold forever.

This is it.

 _That’s_ when everything blurs.

The hum of noise becomes a roar, the trickle of people down the stairs a flood, and they have to move, _now_ , they don’t have time to keep bracing the tunnel walls up, and Dean yells the instruction back, hears it relayed in shouts to the guys who are still manning the digger, and then he’s fighting against the surge of the crowd, scanning it for faces he knows, for _Sam_. He sees Bobby, yelling directions from the corridor entrance, and struggles over to him.

Everything’s fractured. Dean feels the world like a series of images happening around him. He doesn’t have the thread of it anymore.

A kid runs past him in the crowd, yelling _Mom, Dad_. Dean scoops her up and hands her to a woman in a beige overall, who only has time to nod her thanks before she’s carried away from him by the surging mass of people.

A shout, from somewhere up the staircase. It’s packed full for several levels up, the crowd straining and shifting against its confines, and with a muffled scream high above somebody falls. Dean hears the crack of the landing. Sees the sprawled body of a young man in white, the pool of red at his head, the colour so bright it doesn’t look real. The kid is maybe twenty, tops. Dean thinks, in a vague kind of way, that they should find a tarp, cover him up, because that’s what you do with the dead; you give them respect.

That’s a luxury they don’t have. But Dean just stands there for a moment, staring, and can’t do anything, until Bobby’s voice grabs hold of him and pulls him back to reality.

The young guy isn’t the first to fall. Dean doesn’t go back to look at any of the others. He just concentrates on directing the people already down here into the tunnel, and under his breath he prays and prays that none of them are Sam.

They’re not all gonna make it.

The fact occurs to Dean in a dry, abstract kind of a way. He turns it over inside his head and finds that he can’t feel anything about it. It’s too big. It’s like his brain has just gotten overwhelmed and decided to shut down its _thinking about death_ centers.

It’s the hiss of a vent that galvanises him into action. It’s coming from somewhere close by—a cover leaking, coming loose at one corner. Dean has the presence of mind to grab a breathing mask along with the heat tape before he makes his way over to seal it down.

He gets it done, but it won’t be long before another goes. And another. And more, further up in the silo, where there’s nobody left to fix them.

Bobby’s voice at his elbow cuts into his thoughts. “We don’t got long.”

“Yeah.” Dean sighs, rubbing his eyes. “Yeah, I know.”

“And there’s one great big hole in the silo wall, and a whole bunch of people trapped in that tunnel gonna be just as dead as they would be in here once the gas gets in. So we need a plan, boy.”

Dean glances around Mechanical. It’s been his home most of his life, and now he’s scanning the place to strip it for parts.

“We got some sheeting left from last time we fixed up the generator,” he offers. “We can seal the way into the tunnel.”

Bobby shakes his head. “Gonna take too long,” he says. His mouth sets hard, then, his eyes staring off at something Dean can’t see, and he says, “We need to collapse the tunnel roof at this end.”

Dean stares at him.

“We rig some charges up to the generator, we can bring it down. Oughta be enough.”

“Sure, but Bobby—” Dean frowns down at him, at the distant look in his eyes. “If we’re gonna wire them up to the generator, someone’s gonna have to set them off. From back here. We can’t do that remotely. And whoever stayed—there’s no way they’d be able to get out.”

“Yeah, well.” Bobby doesn’t look at him. “That’d be me.”

Dean’s heart stops. “No. No way.”

“Ain’t your decision to make.” Bobby does look at him, then. “Use your damn head, son. I ain’t gonna make it out. That tunnel ain’t exactly friendly terrain. No way I’m getting to your pal’s silo.”

“So we’ll carry you. Jesus, Bobby, you can’t do this. It’s suicide. I ain’t gonna let you.”

The look Bobby turns on him is sharp. “So you’re gonna let every soul in this silo die? Just to save one old man? Because kid, I know you blame yourself for a whole lot of crap you got no right to take responsibility for. But you stop me from doing this? That _will_ be on you.”

“What, you think you’re useless to us because you can’t walk? Bobby, you know that’s—”

“Bull? Yeah, I know it. I been keeping this section running since you were in diapers. I ain’t useless. But that ain’t why I’m doing it.”

Dean looks at him. He opens his mouth around another plea, but nothing comes out.

“Half the people I ever loved died in this damn silo,” Bobby says, then. “Reckon it’s about time I got some rest, too.”

His gaze drifts away; up. Dean doesn’t ask what ghosts he’s seeing.

 

 

 

 

Dean works quickly, helping Bobby set things up. He feels numb, like his hands are independent of his brain and he’s just watching them.

It’s only when they’re done that he’s able to think again. The surge of people down the stairs has slowed, though it’s way too early for that to be happening. The number of people in the silo, the distance from up top—they should still be coming down in droves.

He can hear coughing in the distance, he realises. Echoing from way up the stairwell. It’s the gas. Not just one set of lungs destroying themselves, but dozens. Tens of dozens. He grabs the arm of a woman as she pushes past him.

“What’s going on up there?” he demands.

She shakes her head, sadly. “The gas,” she said. “I could smell it, a few levels up. I don’t think anyone else is gonna make it down.”

Dean’s stomach twists. He hasn’t seen Sam. It shouldn’t have taken him this long. He was only a couple levels up. If he didn’t make it—

“Son, it’s time.”

Bobby’s next to him, and Dean releases the woman’s arm with a mumble of apology, watching her run for the gap in the silo wall. Flashlights swarm in the dark out there, but all he can make out are the outlines of heads and shoulders pushing forward, an underground river of people. They have to save as many of them as they can.

Dean lets out a sigh, heavy and shuddering.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, okay.” He hesitates. “I could stay, you know,” he says. “If, you know. If you don’t wanna be—”

“You can shut your damn fool mouth, is what you can do.” Bobby’s expression softens a little, then, and he puts his hand on Dean’s arm. “Those people out there, they trust you. You got to get them somewhere safe. Now _go_.”

 

 

 

 

Dean goes.

But he can’t help hovering in the tunnel, once he makes it outside. He’s a little too close to the silo wall, not quite out of the danger zone, but until he hears those charges go off, he can’t bear to walk away. He closes his eyes tight, and thinks about Bobby, and all those other people already poisoned to death up in the silo.

Would it have happened anyway, after Gabriel’s crazy message, if he hadn’t mentioned that Silo 34 knew everything, hadn’t let Silo One know that Dean made it back? Or is it all down to Dean?

So many people, Jesus. _Sam_ —

“Dean?”

It’s a distant call, but it makes him open his eyes, searching the darkness. All he can make out at first is a pale streak in the tunnel.

“Dean?” it says, again, and he takes a step forward, squinting.

The streak resolves itself into a tall figure in IT white. There are two shorter ones behind it. The smallest one trudges forward reluctantly, like she doesn’t want to be here at all. The other has yellow hair—and after a moment, she adds her voice. “Dean? Is that you?”

“Sam?” He takes another step forward. “Jess?”

“Yeah.” And then Sam’s beside him, all wide eyes and urgency. “Yeah, it’s me. C’mon, Dean we gotta get out of here.” His eyes fasten on Dean’s face, then, peering at him through the dark. “Dean? What’s going on?”

“Bobby,” is all Dean can manage.

Sam looks back at him in confusion. “Bobby?”

Dean shakes his head mutely.

And then there’s a rumble and the earth shakes, and they’re running. Sam has hold of Jess’s hand, halfway between dragging her along and slowing his long strides so she can keep up. Ruby just sprints, once she figures what’s going on, putting on a spurt and shoving her way into the crowd.

People are running all around them. The tunnel echoes with their footsteps. Dean can hear it above his heartbeat, above the rasp of his breath. He presses forward blindly, following the crowd. He stumbles on a lump of earth and rights himself on stinging palms and keeps running, and then something hits him on the back of the head and everything goes black.

 

 

 

 

He wakes lying on a hard floor.

The last thing he remembers is the tunnel. The charges going off— _Bobby_ , Bobby is gone, and Dean feels the stab of loss in his gut.

Then—running. Running in the dark. Falling.

And now he’s here. Not in the tunnel anymore. His brain buzzes in confusion. He tries opening his eyes, but there are lights directly above him and looking at them hurts, so he closes them again. Does a mental inventory of his injuries. His head is pounding, and the knee he thought was healed up is throbbing again, but otherwise he seems to have all of his limbs. He must’ve fallen on the knee when he got knocked out running after Sam.

Sam. He sits up fast, which makes his head spin, and a hand lands on his shoulder, pressing him back down against the floor.

“Don’t try to get up,” says a voice. “You took a real blow to the head out there.”

Dean knows that voice. He opens his eyes, blinks, and after a moment the fuzzy shape in front of him resolves itself into a woman’s face. “Doctor Tran?” he says. “Where are we? Did we make it?”

She sighs, and for a moment, her businesslike face slips, and she looks very tired. “Some of us did.”

“What—” He swallows. _What did I fuck up? How many people are dead because of me?_ “What happened?”

“I have other patients to deal with.” Abruptly, the tiredness is gone, and she’s all kind, brisk efficiency again. “Why don’t you ask your brother?”

Dean inches into a sitting position again—more carefully, this time, propping himself up on his elbows—and Sam’s face looms into his field of vision. Sam’s dusty, bruised, tired, _alive_ face.

“What happened?” Dean asks him. “How long was I out?”

“A while.” Sam takes a deep breath. “Dean,” he says. “The first thing you should know is—a lot of us made it. A lot of us didn’t, but—a lot of us did. And that’s because of you.”

Dean feels his relief at seeing Sam okay start to dissipate. “Don’t,” he says. “Don’t try and make this into a good thing, Sam. You said it yourself. Don’t tell me I did the right thing. There isn’t one.”

“We made it here,” Sam tells him, instead of arguing. “Silo Twenty-One.”

“And what, we just waltzed in here and took the place over? Thought we were gonna have a fight on our hands.”

“So did I, when we first broke through,” Sam admits. “There were people waiting, in the down deeps. They were armed. They heard the vibrations from the digging. But when they actually saw us—saw that we were just a bunch of tired, injured people who’d lost their home? Enough of them caved that they let us in. Maybe seeing how many of us there were had something to do with it, but—these people aren’t monsters, Dean. They’re pretty weird, maybe, but—honestly, I think they’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”

Dean narrows his eyes, glancing around—and, now that he really looks, he sees that he’s in a kind of makeshift medical bay. Some of the figures moving around, tending to the injured, are in beige overalls like Cas always wore, not Medical pale-blue.

“They just let us in here?”

“Not exactly.” Sam sighs. “But the people in here—they all heard that message, too. One of their own doing that? They’re freaked out, just like we are. They just found out their leaders can’t be trusted—and we know how that feels. They feel betrayed, too.” He shrugs. “I guess they decided it was time to start making their own decisions.”

Dean nods, though he’s reeling a little from the news. The people he spent so long hiding from—they’re just _people_. And, given the chance, they acted like people. It’s tough to get his head around.

He swallows, hard, before he dares to ask the next question—the most important one. “Cas?”

Sam shakes his head, sadly. “I’m sorry, Dean. I haven’t seen anybody who looks like they might be him. It’s pretty crowded, though. Just because we haven’t run into him doesn’t mean he isn’t here.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “I figured. It’s okay.”

But it isn’t okay at all, because then he looks over Sam’s shoulder, and his eyes land on a figure he recognises.

Anna. He can’t see who she’s talking to, but he can hear what she’s saying, and it hits him like another blow to the back of the skull.

“No,” she says. “No, he knew all along. He was my brother. And now he’s dead.”


	20. Chapter 20

_ _

 

_Silo One_

 

Kali wakes early. Soon the silo will be alive with noise: the _whoosh_ of the lifts as they pass by her level; the tramp of footsteps in the corridors outside; the voices of men and women going to and from their shifts with no idea they are being overheard.

Most days, those sounds serve as the alarm that wakes her. Today, she is instantly alert, nerves strung taut as wire, fizzing with excitement in the silence.

She knows the feeling well. This is not the silence before battle; not quite. But this is a mission, of a kind. This is enemy territory, of a kind.

She was a fighter pilot, once. Oh, it didn’t mean the same thing it does in the stories, even all those hundreds of years ago. There were no dogfights in mid-air, no daring risks of life and limb. Sitting in a control room miles from the action was hardly the stuff thrillers were made of, and there was more math than heroism involved, most of the time.

It used to trouble her that war should be so far from visceral. It felt dishonest to remain so far from the deaths one’s own hand brought about—however many interfaces or devices intervened between the trigger finger and the blast.

Now, she would be grateful even to see the world, to act upon it, at such a distance.

She has slept underground for centuries. It should have been forever. If the Lightbringer had his way, that cryopod would be her tomb. The hundreds of other emergency-only personnel who still sleep down there in the cold will never wake. Their presence here is for show, a reassurance for the workers who keep the silo running, who think they will walk out into a safe world one day. Sleeping for decades, waking for a six-month shift in maintenance or surveillance or catering, then going willingly back down into the dark. If they knew—

Nobody in this silo is supposed to get out alive. Not even the man who designed it all. People submit so trustingly to stasis, though. Kali remembers that she did, too. When the end came, when they were told that their being so near the silos was a happy coincidence, when they were told this was for their own good, she walked into the mouth of the earth with everybody else. She let herself be put to sleep with everybody else. If not for the fact of a chance meeting with the Lightbringer’s daughter at a fundraiser, two years before the end—

Well. Kali presses her lips together and does not entertain the alternative.

Wheeling out a few ‘war heroes’ was the done thing, at those kinds of dinners, and Kali’s record certainly qualified her for the role. She’d been only a few weeks back in the States, and felt dislocated amid the glitter of the gala, the light conversation and the choreographed circling of servers. How ordered everything was, beneath the veneer of sociability. She’d thought about making a scene; cracking a crystal glass in her hand to watch its shards break the skin and waving the damage in the faces of the guests. It was only the knowledge that that would be a career-ending move that held her back.

That was when Meg had shown up. Sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued, her posture too loose for the sleek black cocktail dress she wore.

(Kali had dresses like that, too, once—in red and emerald green, in azure and deep purple. When she was home on leave, she wore them with high-heeled pumps and berry-coloured lipstick and went out dancing. She drank. She fucked. She talked philosophy with strangers in the early hours of the morning. Sometimes, with the cold, wild air of the city at night in her lungs, she started fights. She _lived_ —but that was a long time ago.)

Diamonds had dripped from Meg’s ears, but something in the way she moved her head suggested they were an unfamiliar weight, an encumbrance. Kali had been grateful for the company. Meg had held her ear, pointing out the hypocrisy of smooth words ( _compassion for those in need? guess how many vaccine patents his company holds?_ ) and the sly glances of middle-aged men at servers in their teens. She whispered gossip that would have been known only to someone deep in an inner circle, and eventually Kali had raised an eyebrow and asked, “So, you know these people well enough to tell me who they’re fucking. Shouldn’t you be wheeling and dealing, or something?”

Meg’s smile had twisted, just for a second, into something pained. “Doesn’t matter who they’re fucking,” she said, after a moment. “They’re gonna fuck us all in the end.” She paused. “But it’ll work out. You’ll see.”

She got to her feet, then, and sauntered off, snagging a full wine glass from the hand of one of the middle-aged starers as she went.

Kali had shrugged, and then she had forgotten about it. Right up until she’d woken in the cryopod with Meg’s face staring down at her, Meg’s hand clamped over her mouth and a hiss of, “Rise and shine! But _quiet_ , if you wanna live.”

There was desperation in her eyes, then. No _it’ll work out_. She’d learned something in the interim.

Kali turns away from the memory. There’s no fixing it, after all. Only finding out the extent of the damage. That’s what they’re doing here.

She flicks the button on her radio, without much hope. There’s a flat, wordless hiss through the speaker, and, with a noise of disgust, she switches it back off again.

Gabriel hasn’t gotten through to her since the aborted conversation in which she started to tell him about the way out. Perhaps he figured it out from the bare hint she got through. Perhaps not. Kali tells herself that it hardly matters. He is only one human being. Barely that, to her. Just a voice on the airwaves.

So many have died already, and it does not feel as though centuries have passed. It’s ancient history, to Gabriel’s people, to the inhabitants of all the other silos. To her, the end of days is barely yesterday’s news. The fate of one more person should not make a difference.

But it does, and it troubles her. The long sleep has softened her, perhaps. Her mind that thought in trajectories and damage radii has been sidetracked by the quality of a laugh; the unexpected placement of a snide observation, making her laugh aloud and surprised in the midst of a serious conversation; the undertone of sadness beneath a hundred jokes.

These are distractions she can’t afford. She is an _Ancient_ now, a creature of a dead world. She doesn’t get to live in this one.

The lift dings softly, down the corridor, and Kali pads to the door of the small storeroom that now serves as her sleeping-quarters. She presses one hand flat to the door, the other hovering over the handle, and stands there tense until she recognises the approaching footsteps. Meg.

“Wakey wakey,” she calls out, quietly, as she lets herself into the room.

Kali turns to pull on a fresh coverall, nods over her shoulder.

Meg pulls the door closed and leans against it. She purses her lips and leans her hip against the door. The picture is missing a cigarette; she must’ve smoked, once. Her family was rich enough for nanotech. She could’ve afforded to.

“Don’t look so excited,” she says. “Might strain yourself.”

Her sarcasm has a brittle edge that wasn’t there the first time they met. Kali wonders when it first appeared. How long she’s known that her father’s cause wasn’t all it seemed.

She shuts that train of thought down. The world in which they wore dresses and drank champagne, in which she fought wars from an underground bunker and Meg helped design the silos in an air-conditioned office—that world is long gone. She cannot afford the distraction of mourning.

Kali finishes dressing, and they gulp down bitter coffee from a thermos in silence. She studies the schematic she’s marked up one last time as she drinks, then folds it into the pocket of her coverall.

“We’ve got forty minutes once the alarms sound,” Meg tells her as they walk, faces ahead, carefully neutral.

Kali draws on her military bearing; threads steel down her spine and sets it to flash in her eyes, and hopes it will be enough to ward off questions from the workers who pass them. She nods without looking at Meg.

The warhead she has disarmed (an unnatural act, carried out carefully) and rigged up with a camera is already in the tunnel, ready to be fired. The weapons control room was never actually intended to be used. Officially, the silos were designed as a place of refuge in case of a devastating attack. The weapons systems were included as a precaution. Even most of the architects didn’t realise the attack wouldn’t come from any foreign agent; that there would be no enemy out there to fight.

The room is manned by two workers, a shift generally viewed as an extra rest break. In ten minutes, an alarm will sound in there, indicating a problem with the air supply.

They step into the lift and it shoots them upwards. Kali feels an unpleasant weightlessness in her stomach. She has grown accustomed to stillness. As they rise she feels the wrongness of that fact in her bones, the longing to shake it off. She’s like a bird emerging from an oilslick, its useless, weighted-down wings still straining towards flight.

The lift dings and deposits them in a corridor near the top of the silo. Kali has memorised the schematics of the place, but never before visited a level other than the one that houses the cryopods and the one she hid out on. She tries to map the image in her head onto the white corridor before her as Meg marches them along it and takes a sideways step into a deserted locker room.

They pull down protective suits from the overhead lockers and step into them. This part, Kali knows well. She’s practised. It’s one of the few things she’s been able to do, hiding away in her storage room.

Minutes tick by. It’s almost time. She clenches and unclenches her hands, watches her breath mist the inside of the helmet and then dissipate.

Down the corridor, alarms sound.

A light flashes orange above the control room door. An air malfunction is a quiet disaster. It’s a quirk of psychology Kali understands: the compulsion to create artificial noise, to bathe the place in fiery light, to lend it the appearance of chaos it deserves.

The two control room workers, men in beige coveralls, stumble from the room, oxygen masks clamped over their noses and mouths. One still holds a sheaf of playing cards between the thumb and forefinger of his free hand.

There’s no reason they should stumble, no reason they should take great lungfuls of air as they exit the sliding doors and seal the corridor leading to the control room behind them. The air malfunction is not real, after all. But they do it anyway, and when their eyes land on Kali and Meg in their protective suits, their faces show pure relief. Good. Panic has made them careless; they won’t bother to look at ID badges, or to peer through visors and check faces against the personnel database.

Meg locks the door behind them as Kali turns to the control panel.

The alarms will turn themselves off in—Kali glances at the time display on her wrist—thirty-eight minutes. The window is on the long side, for dealing with an air malfunction, but not long enough to draw suspicion. She pulls the map out of her coverall pocket and types the password Meg gave her in on the control panel.

Thirty-seven minutes.

The password’s good. An Access Granted message flashes up on the screen.

“Well?” There’s an undercurrent of anxiety in Meg’s sugary drawl. “Don’t keep a girl waiting. Are you in?”

Kali nods, terse, then remembers that Meg’s keeping watch on the corridor and can’t see her. “It worked,” she says.

Thirty-five minutes.

Her eyes are already on the map, running over her calculations as she programmes them in. It takes the system a couple of minutes to recognise the warhead, and she watches with whited knuckles until the light blinks on. With the adjustments she’s made to it, it was always possible the programme wouldn’t see the warhead as one of their own and let it out.

Thirty-three minutes. Thirty-two. Her heartbeat is loud in her ears. Thirty.

Kali finishes entering her commands. She hits ‘Enter’ and takes a step back from the control panel, letting out a breath. It’s senseless but automatic, stepping away from the controls connected to a weapon as though she’s just lit a fuse. She pulls off her gloves and rubs sweat on the thighs of her coverall.

Twenty-nine minutes.

A message on the screen is the only sign that it’s ready to launch. The silo is vast, the exit tunnels on the other side of concrete walls and corridors and rooms. In the field, she would’ve been close enough to hear the clunk of the warhead slotting into place, the sound of its exit from the tunnel. Here, she stares at the display, and waits.

Twenty-seven minutes.

The shriek as it passes overhead—she might hear that, just about, if it weren’t for the alarms. They’re close to the surface here.

She wonders if Gabriel will hear it, over in Silo Twenty-One. If he will think to connect it with her.

Twenty-six minutes.

A window on the right-hand side of the display flickers into life, and Kali peers at it. The image from the camera she rigged to the warhead. It’s muddy at first, difficult to make out, but gradually it resolves itself.

The electronic eye passes over desert. She waged war in deserts, once, over on the other side of the world. This is just as desolate, but greyer. Emptier. There, the fierce sun cut shadows into the sand like a scalpel. Here, dust casts a pall over everything. Nobody is hiding out there. Nobody living, anyway. It’s a nothingness.

She knows she should have been expecting that. That’s the point. In the area surrounding the silos, infinitesimal nanites fill the air, attacking any and all living matter. They eat away plant fibre and flesh, fur and feather, without discrimination. The slightest weakness, the slightest gap, letting them get to your skin, and you’re doomed.

The rate of disintegration slows, once the organism is dead, and starts to mimic that of natural decay. Keeps the inhabitants of the other silos convinced that it’s poisonous out there. It’s very smart, really. She remembers the bitter note in Meg’s voice, when she first explained the system. Nothing has quite the bite of pride gone sour.

“We were never gonna be selfless with the tech,” she’d said, later. “That’s not how it works. If you’re gonna save the world, you save the best parts for yourself.”

The nanites weren’t made to destroy, she’d explained. They were invented to rejuvenate, to root out disease and dead cells. A use available only to those who could pay, of course—but benign, all things considering. And then a madman had gotten hold of the idea of destroying and rebuilding, and decided to go one better. Destroy the world, and rebuild it in his own image.

Meg’s mouth had quirked into a smile without light. “I still thought we were saving the world. Heaven, here we come.”

Instead, they’d come up with a new way of reducing it to dust.

Twenty-three minutes. On the screen, wasteland.

And then.

Something, at the edge of the screen. The warhead rushes toward it.

 _Green_. Just a suggestion, at first, on the edge of the arid waste. It deepens as it comes into view.

A bank of grassland. _Trees_. Growth, chaos. Life.

Kali exhales, slow and wondering. She leans in towards the screen.

“Look,” she breathes. “It’s like we suspected. The disaster area’s limited. The nanites must’ve been programmed to retreat, eventually. There’s life out there, past the perimeter. It’s viable.”

“Watch the door.” Meg turns, and it’s the first time Kali’s seen her without a smirk or a scowl or a sardonic twist to her lips.

She stands at the door, watching the corridor through the small window to allow Meg to take a loot. She hears Meg’s low whistle.

“Well, fuck me sideways,” she says. “He got it right.” There’s something almost admiring in her tone. She pauses. “Or he got it wrong. Sometimes I don’t know.”

Kali shrugs, knowing an answer isn’t really required from her. She doesn’t have one anyway. Her mind is stuck on, _Life_. The thing destruction serves. Still in the world.

Abruptly, Meg turns away from the control panel. She pulls open a panel on the wall; taps buttons; yanks a lever. She’s running through the protocol for dealing with an air malfunction, even though there’s no problem with the air. They need to follow procedure. When she’s done, the sensors will test the oxygen levels and find that they’re fine. The alarms will stop sounding. The orange light will stop flashing. Kali will cut the connection to the camera, and the screens will go blank. No sign that they were ever here.

But Meg freezes, part-way through pressing her sequence of buttons.

Kali registers her stillness and looks up from the screen, tearing her eyes from the green of the outside world. “What is it?”

“It shouldn’t be—fuck. _Fuck_.”

“Shouldn’t be what?”

Meg rounds on her, eyes hard and desperate. “Get out of here.”

“What’s happening?”

Meg looks as though she isn’t going to answer. She hesitates, and then her panicked expression gives way to the blank slate of her smirk. It’s resigned, though.

“An alert. Went up to the main control room a couple minutes ago. Somebody’s run an air test remotely. Won’t take long for them to figure out there’s nothing wrong. And then they’ll go tell tales to Daddy, and then—” Her expression wavers. “Goodnight Vienna.”

Kali stares. At Meg, at the screen. She has to get out of here, _now_. But tearing her eyes from it—from the promise of a world—suddenly it’s more than she has strength to do.

Meg shoves her until she stumbles. “Go!”

She goes.

 

 

 

 

Back in Kali’s hideout, the hours pass with unendurable slowness. She unstraps the time display from her wrist and fiddles with the mechanism, hits it against the wall in frustration. The minutes refuse to move any more quickly.

Meg doesn’t show.

Kali lets the time slide by. There is nothing she can do but wait, and listen. The footsteps she expects to hear in the corridor don’t come; the voices outside the door never materialise. Her legs turn numb from sitting still so long.

It’s late when she gets to her feet and risks cracking open the door. She doesn’t think they know where she is hiding.

She thinks Meg may not have been so lucky.

The corridor is empty. Kali keeps in tight to the wall, moving slowly. By the time she reaches the elevator, she’s seen no sign of life. Not a surprise. These levels are labyrinthine and sparsely manned. That’s why she’s hiding here.

She presses the button to call the elevator down, then steps out of sight, waiting until it dings and she hears the door slide softly open. She listens out for human noise and hears none.

Quickly, she steps into the elevator. She looks at her reflection in the mirrored wall, adjusts the zip of her coverall. She thinks she looks passable; a tired dayshift worker making her way back to her quarters, not a fugitive. She should get by, so long as nobody asks to see her ID. There are dark shadows under her eyes, and her coverall is rumpled, but that’s it.

That, and the spot of blood under her eye.

Catching sight of it, she frowns, and leans in towards the mirrored panel. She didn’t hurt herself in the control room. She isn’t bleeding.

No—she squints. The spot of blood isn’t on her face. It’s on the wall.

Her eyes follow it. A spot—and then a streak, as though somebody had coated their hand in red paint and dragged it along the side of the elevator.

Or as though someone had grabbed uselessly at the wall and been dragged _out_.

Kali blinks. The blood is still there, a dark-red intrusion in the white quiet of the elevator.

It sets her heart racing, puts a fire in her blood she hasn’t felt in years—in centuries, though it doesn’t feel that way to her. Fear brings her sharpness, clarity.

She has to get out.

 

 

 

 

They call him Lightbringer because he is always there when they come out of cryosleep. The architect, presiding over every detail of his plan, ensuring that his hell runs like clockwork. That’s what Meg told her.

Meg calls him by that name, too, when she talks about him. She must have called him _Dad_ once, surely. But that was in another world.

Kali is probably the only person in this silo who didn’t wake to the sight of his face. She knows him from pictures, though. Speaking before crowds, shaking hands, standing side-by-side with Meg. He looks only a few years older than her; you’d think them brother and sister, not father and child. It’s the nanotech, of course. Unnatural, for things to stay the same so long—but so many people find that reassuring. Endurance. It’s what they see in his design. They overlook the destruction that forms its foundation, that girds it round and holds up its walls. They only see a new world that looks like their old one.

Briefly, Kali wonders if Meg saw his face, before her blood was spilled. If he did it himself, or sent underlings. If she’s still breathing, sinking into cryosleep, or already gone out like a light.

She puts a stop to her wondering, and slips out of the elevator on the next level up.

There will be people looking for her. Meg is an architect, not a weapons expert. He will know she had help reprogramming the warhead. Someone will have checked the records, by now; discovered that there’s an empty cryopod where there should be an unconscious body.

Kali ducks through corridors, makes her way to the elevator on the other side of the level, and gets in. This one is used less frequently. It’ll stand her with a better chance of getting to the level she needs unseen.

She sticks her head out, once the doors open. There are people in the corridor. At the other end, not close enough to see her face. She puts her head down, hands in her coverall pockets, and walks doggedly. She isn’t a fugitive, she’s just late for a shift—

“Hey! Excuse me!”

Head down. Pretend not to hear them.

“Excuse me!”

Kali walks faster. Rounds the corner into a crowd.

The end of a shift, people swarming in the corridor, dawdling and chatting. She weaves into the crowd, ducking her head.

Her eyes land on the entrance to a changing room, at the far end of the corridor. There’ll be equipment in there. Protective suits. She fixes her eyes on the door.

If anyone’s still calling after her, the sound gets lost amid the human noise. It’s uncomfortable, all that chatter, the proximity of more people than she’s seen since before—since _before_.

She ploughs through it. Makes it to the changing room, pulls down a protective suit from an overhead locker, and pulls it on. She works mechanically, not allowing herself to think too hard about what she’s doing.

Nobody comes after her. They must have lost her in the crowd. Kali breathes through the silence, waiting for the noise of people in the corridor to dissipate.

She won’t be able to use the main ways up the silo. The top canteen is always in use, and the lifts will be busy with people shuttling up and down to eat. But she has a better idea.

There’s access to the exit tunnels from this floor. They’re rarely manned, and nobody will expect her to return there now that her seeing-eye warhead has been fired.

It seems oddly appropriate, that she should leave this way. She was a weapon herself for a long time, after all.

She was part of the old world, the old, ruthless, chaotic world; the world no architect was ever really going to design into compliance.

And she’s going back there. She’s going _outside_.


	21. Chapter 21

_ _

 

_Silo 21_

 

“Jess? Over here!” Sam gives the door another wrench, but it doesn’t budge. He’s gonna have to wait for Jess to be done with the lock pick.

They’re in what must once have been a security station, in the silo’s lower mids, opening up locked cells one by one. The keys have gotten lost somewhere in all the confusion. Picking locks by hand is painfully slow work, but they don’t have the equipment to hurry things up.

They didn’t have time to think about contingencies before they ran from their own silo. They didn’t have time to get packed up. They didn’t even have time to really get a grip on what was happening. Sam still feels a little like he’s in a dream, moving zombified from task to task because his mind can only focus on the little things. The big things are too big, too devastating. They’ve left so much behind. They’ve lost so many people. Sam still hasn’t really gotten his head around Ellen being gone, or even Dad, and now—

Now, Bobby’s dead too. Half of IT are dead—people he and Jess have worked with every day for the past two years, who were just as fooled by Ruby as they were, people they thought of as friends. All those people Sam didn’t know by name; strangers, or faces he recognised from the canteen or the corridors but never spoke to. They’re gone, too, snuffed out at the push of a button by a stranger’s hand in some other silo.

And then there’s Dean.

He seems okay, physically speaking. The knock to the head he took in the tunnel didn’t do any lasting damage. But he hasn’t spoken more than a couple sentences to Sam—or anybody else—since he woke up in the makeshift sickbay in this silo’s down deeps. He asked how they got in, asked after Cas—and then he just sat there, staring into space. When it came out that this silo has had its share of unrest over the past couple weeks, and that a few people had mysteriously vanished off duty even before today, Sam kind of expected Dean to jump up and volunteer to help out, never mind his own injuries. That’s the kind of thing he’d pull. He didn’t, though; just nodded silently when Sam said that he and Jess were headed up to help look for people, and made no move to follow them.

Sam should be relieved about that. He isn’t.

He sighs, and tries to put his worries from his mind. Getting through to Dean is a tough job at the best of times, and right now, it looks like a losing battle. There are other people in here who he can help. Innocent people, locked up for asking questions, just like back home.

Sam isn’t sure what he’s gonna find behind the door. Most of the people they’ve gotten out so far have only had a few bruises to show for their time in the cells.

Not all of them, though. A couple were in bad shape, had to be led—or carried—down to the makeshift medical bay. It was obvious some of them were in no state to make it to the down deeps without collapsing, so they’ve gotten a second medbay set up in the lower mids, just below the level Sam and Jess are searching right now.

“Sam?” Jess jogs along the corridor towards him. “What’s happening?”

“I need to get this door open. Not sure if there’s anybody in there, but we should check.”

She nods and gets to work, her small, deft hands making short work of the lock. Sam stands back and lets her get on with it.

Jess may be all smiles, most of the time, but when it comes to helping people, she’s all focus and competence. Even if she does poke her tongue out when she concentrates.

Seeing that, Sam feels a small glow in his chest, despite the loss all around them, despite the uncertainty of what lies ahead of them. Their world may be collapsing—but with her by his side, he still feels like he has a foundation to stand on, somehow.

Jess smiles up at him as the lock clicks. The door swings open, and she steps back to let him look inside.

It’s a tiny room, dark, but—shit, it _smells_ like someone’s in here. Like someone’s been in here for days, maybe longer. Sam peers through the gloom.

On the other side of the cell, something stirs.

“Hello?” he says, into the darkness.

No reply.

“Hello?” he says, again. “I’m here to help. My name’s Sam Winchester. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

At the sound of his name, there’s an abrupt movement: the figure in the shadows sitting up. Even though he can’t see the person’s face, Sam gets the feeling he’s being stared at.

“We have a sickbay set up a couple levels down,” he goes on. “You should come get checked over.”

The person doesn’t move. Sam takes a step closer.

Then a voice says, “Sam… Winchester?”

It’s hoarse, rough, like it hasn’t been used in a while. But it’s what the guy says next that makes Sam freeze.

“Is Dean with you?”

“Cas,” he realises. “You’re Cas.”

 

 

 

 

Between them, Sam and Jess get the guy— _Cas_ —out of there.

He’s unshaven, dark circles under his eyes, and he fucking reeks. He looks like he’s been in there for longer than just days, and the way he blinks like a newborn kitten when he gets out into the light confirms it. But the tousled dark hair and the piercing blue eyes and the slightly-unsettling intensity with which he looks at people—Sam recognises all of those from Dean’s story, and he’s glad.

Maybe seeing Cas will help, do something to shake Dean out of whatever state of shock he’s in.

Dean never told him, not in so many words, but Sam isn’t dumb. With Dean, it’s always been more important to listen to the things he keeps quiet. The look he got in his eyes when he told Sam about the stranger who saved him, the care he took to shut the conversation down before it could touch on how he actually felt about the whole thing—well. It’s obvious there was something between them.

“Is Dean with you?” Cas asks again, before they’ve even gotten him down the corridor. He’s walking under his own steam now, but he’s a little wobbly, so Sam hovers at his side, ready to catch him if his legs do decide to give way.

“Not right here,” Sam tells him. “He’s in the down deeps. There’s another medical bay set up there. He got hit on the head pretty good.”

Cas’s eyes widen. “Is he—”

“He’s gonna be fine,” Sam assures him. If he hadn’t already figured things out, the undisguised relief that floods over Cas’s face would be all the proof he needs.

“Can I speak to him?”

They have a radio back at the medical bay just below this level; Sam should be able to get through to the one downstairs on it. “Sure,” he says. “Once we’ve gotten you to a doctor.” He wrinkles his nose. “And a shower.”

Cas nods and lets himself be led to the medbay. Sam explains what went down as they walk.

When he gets to the part about Gabriel’s broadcast, Cas flinches. Sam remembers the way Dean talked about him, then—as Cas’s _brother_. Like, actual brother, not whatever other weird thing that means over here.

Cas doesn’t say anything, though. He listens to the rest of the story, lets himself be checked over by a medic, fed water and painkillers and a couple protein bars, given a change of clothes and directed to the nearest bathroom to clean up. By the time he comes out—steadier on his feet, now—he looks less like death warmed over and more like… just a really tired guy.

Tired or not, though, there’s steel in his eyes, and he moves over to Sam with determination.

“I want to speak to Dean,” he says.

“Yeah,” Sam says. “Yeah, of course.” He grabs the radio.

It’s getting late, and it’d be more sensible to wait until morning, probably. Dean looked exhausted when Sam left him, and even though that hit on the head wasn’t too serious, he could probably still use a decent night’s rest. Hopefully someone in the medbay downstairs has the drugs to provide it for him.

But the anxiety in Cas’s eyes is the same anxiety Sam felt when he thought Jess was gone for good. If Dean’s feeling that, too—well, Sam can’t not put an end to it. He can’t.

“You reading me down there?” he says into the radio.

 _Hello?_ comes a voice on the other end. He half-recognises it. It isn’t Doctor Tran—it’s a guy’s voice, young-sounding.

“Kevin?” he guesses.

_That’s my name. Everything okay on your end?_

“As it can be, yeah,” Sam says. “Listen, can you put my brother on? I, uh. Found somebody who wants to speak to him.”

There’s a moment’s pause, and then, _He isn’t with you?_

Sam’s stomach drops. “What do you mean? He should still be in bed, dammit.”

 _Hold on_. Another pause, and then, _Nope, not here. He left ages ago. My mom says she tried to talk some sense into him, but he wouldn’t stay. Just started climbing. She thought he went to find you._

“That can’t be right.” Sam blinks and looks around, as though the action’s somehow going to summon Dean into being in front of him. “He hasn’t shown up here. You said he left hours ago? If he was on his way up, he should’ve gotten here by now.”

 _I don’t know what to tell you. He’s been gone a while_.

Sam shakes his head. His mind is working, and he doesn’t like where it’s taking him.

He remembers what Dean said to him, earlier. _Don’t try and make this into a good thing_. Like all the people who are still alive because Dean found the way out and talked Bobby into opening it don’t count. Not when there are people who didn’t make it, lives Dean can pile up on his conscience and crush himself under.

Sam gets it. He does. He knows there were no good choices here. He remembers saying as much to Dean, weeks ago, before he came back to their silo.

Now, he starts to wonder if he should’ve kept his mouth shut.

Dean left the medbay. He started climbing. And if he hasn’t shown up here—then maybe he just carried on up the stairs. Made for the up tops.

Sam sets the radio down abruptly, feeling sick. He stands there looking at it, like if he just stays there and denies it hard enough, he can erase that last conversation from existence, or Kevin will radio back up to him and tell him it’s all been a mistake, Dean’s safe downstairs, sound asleep in a medbay bunk.

A small, abrupt movement to his left brings Sam out of his reverie.

Cas has gone rigid. He stands ramrod-straight, hands fisted at his sides. He shakes his head.

“He can’t,” he says. His voice is quiet, but there’s a steely edge in it. The way his eyes flicker upwards tells Sam he’s jumped to the same conclusion. “I tried to—I told him—I thought he heard me.” Cas breaks off, his expression anguished. “He can’t.”

Sam looks at him helplessly.

There’s a muffled noise on the other end of the connection. Voices, somewhere just out of hearing range. Then:

 _Someone else here wants to speak to you_ , Kevin says. _Have you run into somebody called ‘Castiel’?_

Sam blinks. It takes him a moment to remember that’s Cas’s full name; he’s gotten so used to thinking of him the same way Dean talks about him. He nods, then registers that Kevin can’t see him, and says, “Yeah. Yeah, he’s with me right now. Put them on.”

 _Castiel?_ says a woman’s voice. _Brother?_

Cas steps forward to speak into the radio, his expression softening. “Anna?” he says. “Are you alright?”

_I’m fine. They only locked me up._

He closes his eyes and lets out a breath of obvious relief. His next words are, “Have you seen him?”

Sam doesn’t need context to know who he means.

 _Yes_ , the woman—Anna—says, and Sam feels a flicker of hope. _Earlier today. I spoke to a woman from the other silo. I explained to her what had happened—that Gabriel had been killed, and you taken away. I didn’t know Dean had woken up. But if he overheard only part of the conversation? Out of context—I’m afraid he might think—_

She trails off, but Sam gets the idea. From the way his eyes go wide, Cas obviously gets it, too.

This is worse than Sam thought. Dean was already in a bad way, after what happened to their silo. How quiet he was after he woke up, how passive—like he was just on the edge of giving up.

If he thinks Cas is dead too? Well, that might just be enough to push him over.

“I’ll radio around the levels between here and the lower medbay,” Sam says, attempting to sound reassuring. “Maybe he decided to take a break, get some water. He was tired. Maybe he hasn’t gotten this far yet.”

He doesn’t sound convincing, or convinced, and he turns back to Cas feeling like he should apologise.

Cas isn’t standing next to him anymore. Sam looks around in surprise, and finds him sitting down near the area where Charlie and Ash are handing out clean clothes to patients, pulling on a pair of boots. He’s frowning, not really looking at what he’s doing, eyes fixed on the empty air in front of his face.

Sam knows that expression. He’s seen it on way too many people, lately.

“Hey, man,” he says. No response. “ _Cas_.” Cas looks up at him. “You can’t just take off. You’re dehydrated, you need food and rest. Let me and Jess go find Dean.” He’s careful to say _find_ , not _look for_ , but he doesn’t manage to sound any more confident than he feels.

Cas scowls up at him. “I’m going after him,” he says, and the vehemence in his eyes actually makes Sam want to take a step back.

He doesn’t. He doesn’t push it, either.

The chances are, Dean hasn’t stopped to rest up, because he’s a fucking idiot. The chances are, he’s on one of the floors above them right now, and still climbing. Working himself up into a fever of self-blame, because he’s got nobody to _tell_ him that he’s a fucking idiot, or that just because they didn’t have any good options doesn’t mean he’s responsible for all those people dying, or that maybe he should start blaming the people who did the killing.

Cas gets to his feet and starts stuffing things into an empty pack. Painkillers, water, bedding. He doesn’t look up at Sam.

“Okay,” Sam finds himself saying. “I’m gonna ask around on the radio. I’ll catch you up.”

Cas stops packing and puts a hand on his arm, then. He does it carefully, like he’s unsure if it’s the right thing to do.

People from this silo haven’t exactly been touchy-feely, and Sam realises with a pang that Cas must’ve picked the gesture up from Dean.

“I will find him,” Cas says.

Sam lets it buoy him up; lets himself believe, for a moment, that it might be true.

 

 

 

 

They wouldn’t have sent Cas to cleaning. Dean knows that.

His body is probably buried under the dirt in the silo’s farm levels. For a little while, Dean entertains the fantasy of laying down there and joining him.

Cas’s silo executed people, but didn’t send them _outside_. That means they must have guns here somewhere. It’d be quick. He could settle down on the soil and breathe in the dark, sweet smell of it, look up and see the canopy of green above his head, and pull the trigger.

Maybe eventually, someone would plant an apple tree over his bones.

He knows he won’t do it. Partly out of sympathy for whatever poor bastard might hear the shot and find his body, but mostly—

Dean remembers telling Cas that people weren’t supposed to live underground. He remembers Cas saying, _you aren’t_ , like he thought Dean was something special.

He remembers dreaming about wind in the trees.

The top part of Cas’s silo is almost deserted, according to everything he’s overheard. It’s all hands on deck in the down deeps; even the control room with the listening posts is manned by a skeleton crew. Nobody’s going to interrupt him before he finds a cleaning suit and fixes it up. It shouldn’t take long, now he’s done it once and he has the procedure all figured out.

He could just walk out there without one, he guesses. Maybe it would be better, less selfish of him, if he did. It isn’t like any of his attempts at finding the truth have done anybody much good so far. Still. Maybe it’s dumb, maybe it’s pointless, maybe he’s just the kind of asshole who can’t quit no matter how many people have died because he couldn’t let it drop, but he wants one last look.

Cas’s drawing is still folded up in the pocket of his coverall. If he walks towards the perimeter, towards the spot where all those lines converge, then maybe he’ll last long enough to see it. He’ll know, if there really is a world out there.

And maybe someday, someone else will finally get it right; will get them there.

 

 

 

 

The climb wears on him. Dean wasn’t exactly feeling great when he started out, and now his head is pounding and he’s punishingly thirsty and he emptied his water canteen seven levels down. His knee starts up a heavy, relentless throb well before he reaches the mids, and half the time he feels as though he’s hauling himself up by the stair rail more than climbing.

He keeps going anyway. If he stops, he’s gonna have to be alone with his ghosts, and he isn’t about to stop running from them now.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow he’ll walk right into their outstretched arms; tomorrow they can have him forever. Right now, he can’t think about them, so he walks until his eyelids droop and his legs threaten to give out under him.

He blinks heaviness from his eyes and looks around.

It’s dark, and there are so many near-identical levels that he doesn’t recognise it, at first. It’s only when he ventures off the landing and finds that he’s in a deserted storage level with a bathroom near the entrance that he figures out where he is.

He’s come full circle. Out over the top and up through the earth, right back to the level he hid out on when he was living here.

Dean actually laughs. It’s cracked, painful. A faint echo of it whispers back to him off the walls.

As if drawn by a magnet, he walks towards the storage locker and pulls open the unlocked door. Just like he thought, there’s nothing left in there. No sign that he was ever here.

Which would’ve been best, probably.

Slowly, limbs aching, he sits cross-legged on the floor.

The silence and the darkness are familiar. When he closes his eyes, he can imagine that Cas is sitting right next to him. That if he shifted an inch to the left, their shoulders would brush together. If he turned his head, he’d see Cas’s shadowed eyes, his sudden, guileless smile.

There he is with the ghosts again.

He shakes his head. “Cas, man,” he says softly, into the dark. “Saving my sorry ass—that was the dumbest thing you ever did.”

“I disagree.”

Dean thinks the voice is inside his head, for a moment. Maybe his brain has finally decided to go snap. It sounds just about pathetic enough to be true, his mind conjuring reassurances out of the dark.

But he doesn’t feel like he’s alone anymore. He opens his eyes.

And there’s his ghost, standing in the storage locker doorway.

He stares. “Cas?” he breathes out, chest tightening.

Then Cas is kneeling in front of him, reaching for his hands and caressing their palms with the pads of his thumbs, searching his face with big, worried eyes.

He’s pale, unshaven, his eye-sockets bruise-dark. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, Dean, it’s me.”

They’re hanging onto each other, then, Cas almost pitching forward into him, Dean burying his face in the crook of Cas’s neck and taking unsteady breaths.

Not a ghost. _Cas_.

“You can’t do this,” Cas says, into the side of his face. “Do you understand? You don’t—you can’t do this. Dean. You can’t.”

Cas is here and he’s alive and if it isn’t a dream, if this is really happening, then Dean would sell his goddamn soul to keep it. He wants to just keep holding onto Cas, wants to agree with whatever he says, if it’ll just make him stay here, keep him solid and touchable in Dean’s arms.

He can’t. He gives a mirthless little laugh and says, “Why the fuck not?”

Cas’s face is all anguish. “Because I need you. Dean.”

Dean should argue. He should tell Cas that he was just fine before Dean came along; that all he does is screw things up, bring death and destruction down on the heads of everybody around him.

He gets as far as saying, “Cas, Cas, that’s—” before his voice dies in his throat and he finds that he doesn’t have the strength for it. “Okay,” he says, instead. “Okay, I won’t.”

 

 

 

 

Sam gets nothing on the radio. A couple uncertain possible-sightings, but they’re all hours old. Dean’s nowhere to be found between here and the silo’s down deeps.

He gets the message out around the silo as best he can. Then he fills two canteens, because he doubts there are many operational water stations between here and the up tops, and stuffs a few things into a pack. When he checks the time, he finds that Cas has a couple hours’ head-start on him.

He stops to tell Jess where he’s going, kisses her cheek, then starts climbing.

Sam’s bone-tired—they all are—and he starts to feel heavy as he ascends. The hope he felt at Cas’s earlier reassurance falls away, fear taking its place in the eerie quiet of the staircase. He’s never been anywhere this empty before. The canteens he filled up before he left weigh him down and he rests up for a while in the fifties, stretching out his aching legs and letting his head fall back against the landing wall. His eyelids droop.

But he can’t sleep. Not until he knows Dean is safe. He groans and levers himself upright, muscles protesting.

He’s ready to move off again when the radio clipped to his belt crackles. He lifts it to his mouth in surprise. “Hello?”

It’s Cas’s voice that answers. _Found him_ , it says. _Thirty_. Then the radio cuts out.

It’s enough. Sam closes his eyes and lets out a sigh of gratitude.

He sleeps for a little while, after that, and picks up the climb early in the morning. By the time he makes it to Thirty it’s early morning and the staircase lights are flickering on one by one.

Sam expects to find them camped out on the landing, but there’s no sign of life there. He frowns and starts to pick his way down a deserted corridor, running the beam of his flashlight along the walls.

At the end of it, he finds the only light switched on in the entire level. It belongs to a bathroom, which is empty, coming off the wall of a vast, denuded storeroom, also empty.

Then he hears a noise. A quiet, sleepy murmur, like somebody talking in a dream.

He follows it cautiously, keeping his footsteps soft; finds himself peering around the open door of one of the giant storage lockers.

Someone’s lying on the floor under a blanket, almost completely hidden—but the tuft of hair sticking out the top is unmistakeably Dean’s. Cas, fully clothed atop the blanket, is curled around him, his face nuzzled into Dean’s hair, his arm draped over Dean’s shoulders.

The protectiveness of the posture is startling. Intimate.

He and Dean shared a room, before Sam went up to shadow in IT, and the sock-doorknob system isn’t exactly foolproof. So he’s walked in on his brother in bed with people before now, and usually with a lot less clothing involved. Dean always seemed to think his embarrassment was hilarious, and eventually Sam learned to just roll his eyes and go sit out in the kitchen until the coast was clear.

For all that, this is the first time Sam truly feels like he’s stumbled in on something private.

But it lays to rest a fear Sam hasn’t quite known he’s been feeling until now. That Dean has just found himself another lost soul to try to save; another impossible responsibility to beat up on himself for failing. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Cas—he seems like a decent kind of guy. A little intense, sure, a little hollow-eyed, but then who wouldn’t be after who-knows-how-long locked in a cell? Decent, though.

It’s just that finding things to feel like crap about is kind of Dean’s specialty. Cas could easily become another one of those things.

But the guy hasn’t even peeled himself away from Dean’s side long enough to take off his boots. It’s reassuring, somehow.

Sam steps away from the door and heads for the bathroom.

He splashes water on his face and brushes his teeth, wincing at his bloodshot eyes in the mirror and trying not to wonder when the last decent night’s sleep he had was. Then he arranges himself cross-legged on the landing, digs in his pack for a couple nutrient bars, and settles in. He can wait a while.

 

 

 

 

He’s still sitting there when they emerge. Cas stumbles out onto the landing first. Dean comes half a step behind him, avoiding Sam’s eyes. They’re holding hands. Or—well, it’d be more accurate to say Cas is clutching Dean’s hand for dear life, like he’s still afraid to let him go.

Dean may have gotten a few hours’ shut-eye—more than Sam did, probably—but he still looks like crap. He’s pale, and there are dark circles under his eyes, and at one point he stops and winces in a way that tells Sam he definitely shouldn’t have gone climbing on that knee yesterday.

But he walks up to Sam and sits down opposite him, and after a moment of studiously not looking him in the face, says, “So. Uh. Cas says I gave you a pretty good scare, yesterday.”

Sam can’t help it: he smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“Look, I’m sorry.” Dean meets his eyes. “Seriously. Dick move, I get it.” He hesitates, then, and Sam sees Cas stroke a thumb across the back of his hand before he continues. “But me and Cas, we did a lot of talking this morning. And I got this crazy idea.”

“…Okay?” Sam says.

“I can’t do this anymore.”

Sam frowns at him. “Do what?”

“ _This_.” Dean gestures around him. “Everything. Everything I’ve done down here, it’s gotten fucked up some way or another. Yesterday, all I could think was—I want it to be over, man. Done. Mom and Dad are dead, Ellen’s dead, Bobby, Henriksen, even that asshole Gabe. All those other people. And yesterday—I thought Cas was dead too. That was it, man. I just wanted to go. I was gonna climb up there and walk out and let it kill me.”

Sam’s heart clenches. “Dean—”

“Sammy. Let me finish.”

Dean fishes in his pocket, then, takes out a piece of paper that Sam recognises. It’s the same drawing he’s been referring to, off and on, since he got back to their silo. Cas leans in to pore over it with him, tracing the lines with an expression that’s part recognition, part surprise, and Sam realises why Dean’s been clinging to it so hard.

“I’m not gonna do that anymore,” Dean says. “I mean, it ain’t a suicide mission.”

He glances sideways, at Cas. Cas looks back at him, intensely serious, and suddenly Sam feels like he’s intruding again.

“But I’m still doing it,” Dean says, then.

Sam looks at him in confusion. “What the hell, Dean?” he says. “There’s no way that’s anything _but_ a suicide mission.”

“I’m not so sure.” Dean nudges Cas with his elbow. “You tell him, Cas.”

Cas looks kind of reluctant, but at Dean’s encouraging look, he starts, “My brother, Gabriel.”

Sam raises an eyebrow. “That’s the guy who got half our silo killed?”

Cas has the grace to duck his head, his expression clouding. “I am sorry for—” he begins.

Sam cuts him off. “Don’t,” he says. “Just tell me—whatever Dean wants you to tell me.”

“Gabriel was in contact with a woman in Silo One. She believed—or at least, he believed that she believed—there was something else out there. A safe place, beyond the silos. I have no idea whether she could be trusted, or even whether Gabriel’s word could be trusted. But if it exists?” He places his fingertip on the drawing, on the spot where all the lines converge. “This is it. I’m sure.” He looks up, then, meets Sam’s eyes. “If Dean means to go find out, then I mean to go with him.”

“I gotta know, Sammy,” Dean puts in. “And this one time, I can do it without putting anybody else’s ass on the line. So I gotta know.”

“Okay.” Sam takes a deep breath, puts his head on one side. “How’re you gonna do it? Souped-up cleaning suits, like how you got back here?”

“That’s the plan.”

“How many you got here, Cas? A few dozen, more?”

Cas blinks in surprise at being addressed, but he answers with a nod. “More,” he says. “My silo hasn’t sent anyone to cleaning in decades. The original stocks are mostly intact. They’re old, but with Dean’s modifications, they should be serviceable.”

“Then I’m coming with you, too,” Sam decides. Dean opens his mouth, looks like he’s gonna argue, but Sam doesn’t let him cut in. “You said it wasn’t a suicide mission. So I’m coming with you. There are others who’ll want to come, too. You can bet on that.”

“Sammy—”

“You aren’t the only one who wants to know, Dean.”

Dean looks at him. “And if we do find something, what then? We invite the whole silo to make the trek?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Okay,” Dean says, at last. “Okay. But nobody comes who doesn’t want to, okay? I’m—I’m through making decisions for the whole damn silo. Ex-silo. Whatever. I ain’t having any more lives on my conscience, Sammy. Can’t do it.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Sam says. Then, quieter, “I just wish you’d give up some of the ones you’re carrying. It isn’t all on you.”

Dean doesn’t answer that. But after a moment, he looks from Sam to Cas and back again, and there’s something new in his expression.

It’s something that might not be hope, might not be excitement—but it isn’t misery, either. It’s _something_ , and that’s enough.

“Okay,” Dean says. “If we’re doing this? We need a plan.”


	22. Chapter 22

 

“Ready?”

Dean glances to his right, watching Cas’s profile through the visor of his cleaning suit. He’s facing dead ahead, eyes on the doors, but after a moment his gaze flickers to the left, like he’s sensed Dean looking at him. He reaches out, wordlessly; squeezes Dean’s hand through the heavy gloves they both wear.

Dean swallows. “Ready.”

Sam presses the button. The airlock door shudders and begins to rise.

It’s grey outside, just like it always has been. Dean can hear the howling of the wind, and there’s a twist of apprehension in his gut that he can’t keep down. However painstakingly he’s worked on the cleaning suits, hovering over everybody involved to make sure his instructions were being followed to the letter, however many times they’ve gone over the map to make sure their distance calculations are right, the idea of going _outside_ still has that mythic dread to it. Even if Dean has survived it twice.

Still, nobody else here has ever set foot out the door, which makes Dean the de facto leader. Not a position he wanted to find himself in again, but it seems to be sticking to him like shit, so.

And it isn’t all bad. He has Cas on his left—giving his hand one more brief squeeze before they go—and Sam, a steady presence on his right. Jess stands a little behind them; Benny, Jody, a couple other adventurous souls. So maybe Dean’s an old hand at this, but for the first time, he isn’t facing it alone. That counts for something.

He hasn’t been sure of much in his life, these past few months, but he’s sure of that.

The door is up. Dean raises his hand in the _move out_ signal, and then—then, they’re _outside_.

The wind howls. It tears at them, trying to push them back down the slope towards the silo doors. Just walking is a fight. The ground is uneven beneath their feet, loose rock and dust that shift and give way with every step. They make for the bank and the wind shoves them back in the direction they came from. More than once, somebody stumbles, lands on their ass or their knees, and the whole group stops to help them up. No getting separated out here: they’ve made that their Rule Number One.

Dean keeps his eyes on the high ground, fastens his gaze to the top of the bank, like it’s a thread that’ll pull them up there.

He takes a bad step, halfway up, a patch of loose rock giving way beneath his foot. He goes down with a hiss of pain, wincing at the thought of the bruises he’s gonna have tomorrow.

There’s a touch on his left shoulder. Sam, offering a hand to pull him to his feet. Cas is on his other side, arm outstretched in the same gesture.

A couple weeks—hell, a couple days—ago, he would’ve ducked out from under their hands, refused their help.

Now, he nods a silent thanks. He takes both hands.

The view from the top of the bank isn’t exactly encouraging. The wind whips up the dust into a cloud thick enough that it’s like looking through soup. There’s no green, no sign of life; just cracked, grey wasteland as far as the eye can see.

But as far as the eye can see—isn’t that far, actually. Dean can barely make it out, through the dust, but in the distance—the land slopes _up_.

And beyond that, who knows?

Dean reaches into the pocket of his cleaning suit and pulls out the drawing. He studies it for a moment, then raises his arm, turns back to the others and mouths, _Follow me_.

It’s slow going. Dean’s knee twinges, and before they’ve gotten halfway to that slope he’s out of breath, convinced they’re not gonna make it.

But somehow, miraculously, they do.

It’s a gradual incline, not a steep bank like the ones that enclose the silos, and when they reach the top, it takes him by surprise. There’s ground sloping up before him, and then—then, there’s space, stretching out in front of them, just like the Legacy said. Just like he dreamed about.

It takes his breath away. He stands there for a moment, staring. It’s like vertigo, like poking your head over a stair railing in the up tops and looking all the way down and trying not to think about falling. At the same time, it’s nothing like that at all.

Then Cas is grabbing his arm, pointing at something in the distance. Dean takes a moment to register the direction he’s pointing in. It’s that spot on the map. Where all the lines—all the ways out—converge.

Dean squints, following Cas’s line of sight. There’s something there. Some kind of structure—a building? It’s too regular to be anything scoured out of the rocks by the wind. It’s man-made.

And then he isn’t even thinking about that, isn’t even looking at it, because behind it, there’s _green_.

Gradually, the others turn and look where Cas is pointing. The expressions on their faces turn from confusion to awe as they realise what they’re seeing.

It gives them their second wind. As one, they get on the move again, picking up their pace by unspoken, mutual agreement, bracing into the wind and covering the harsh terrain with determined strides. The wind lessens as they descend the slope, but the easier terrain has nothing to do with it. If it wasn’t for the heavy cleaning suits, Dean thinks, they’d be sprinting.

Fuck. They’re almost there. They’re gonna make it—

Cas grabs his arm again.

This time, he doesn’t point at the structure they’re heading for. He gestures back across the wasteland, the way they came. Dean peers through the dust. At first, he can’t make anything out, and he shrugs, turning back to Cas. _It’s just dust_ , he tries to convey, with his shoulders and his spread palms. _You’re seeing things._

Cas just gestures again, his face set, his eyes narrowed. Dean takes another look.

There.

There’s somebody moving over the waste towards them, the white of their cleaning suit looming like a ghost out of the dust. Somebody who isn’t part of the group.

They only fixed up enough cleaning suits for the first group to set out from the silo. No point making more until they knew there was something out here to come looking for. So this can’t be someone else from Cas’s silo following them.

Dean just stares, scrabbles for an explanation. He comes up with jack.

And then the radio in his coverall pocket crackles to life.

He fumbles with it through the thick fabric of his cleaning suit, struggling to get it close to his ear.

“Who is this?” he says. “What’s going on? Who’s out here?”

The radio crackles back at him, but he can’t make out any actual words.

The figure gets closer. Whoever it is moves like they’re unaccustomed to the bulky cleaning suit, but they’re hurrying, tripping and holding their arms out for balance. They’re near enough, now, that Dean can see the person’s face through the visor—a woman, dark, with sharp, pretty features.

Her cleaning suit, though—it isn’t jury-rigged like all the rest. She doesn’t look like she’s struggling to breathe, either. The suit just does what it’s supposed to do.

It was designed to survive _outside_ , not like the ones in Dean’s silo, or Cas’s.

Through the radio, a voice speaks. It’s faint, muffled, and Dean can’t get it any closer to his ear. But he can just about hear what she’s saying.

_Is Gabriel with you?_

He stares at the woman. She comes to a stop in front of them, hovering at a cautious distance. Her lips move, and the voice comes through the radio again.

 _Gabriel_ , she repeats. _Is he with you?_

“You’re her,” Dean realises. “You’re Kali. You’re from Silo One.”

 _Not anymore_. Her eyes harden. _I’m not from there anymore._

“Okay.” Dean swallows. “Okay. But you—they—know about us? That we’re out here?” His brain runs through possibilities, none of them good. If Silo One has cleaning suits that let people just walk around outside, maybe they’ll send people after them. Or maybe they have weapons—the long-range kind, like Dean read about in the Legacy. Maybe they could just push a button and kill them all right where they stand. Fuck, he should’ve thought of this, he should never have let Cas or Sammy or any of the others follow him out here—

But Kali shakes her head. _Even I didn’t know._

Oh. “Then why are you here?”

_I couldn’t stay in there. He knew. The architect. We knew what he’d done to the world. We wanted to see what was out there, if there was anything._

“Who’s ‘we’?” Dean asks.

Her face goes carefully blank. It’s a kind of blank Dean recognizes. _The only other person on my side—I think she’s dead. They would’ve found me too, eventually._

“Huh.” It actually makes Dean feel a little better, to know that not everybody in Silo One is an irredeemable psycho. That maybe the Ancients weren’t all bad.

Of course, the bad guys still won, but. Can’t have everything.

 _Is Gabriel here?_ Kali says again, then. _I keep asking. You keep not answering._

“No.” Dean sighs. “No, he ain’t here.”

_Is he—_

Dean can’t give her an answer to that. If he says ‘yes’, he’ll have to follow it up with ‘I’m sorry’, and he isn’t, not really. Even though Gabriel was Cas’s brother, even though it probably wasn’t his fault he snapped. Every time Dean thinks about the guy being dead, he weighs it against all those people back in his silo who might still be alive if Gabriel hadn’t decided to tell it to the airwaves, against those soul-destroying hours when he thought Cas was the one who was gone, and he can’t manage _sorry_.

So he just stands there dumbly. For a moment, Kali stays silent.

Then, _I’m coming with you_ , she says, and straightens, and starts striding towards the structure on the edge of the green like she knows exactly where she’s going.

“What is that place?” Dean finds the presence of mind to ask.

 _It’s what you should have had five hundred years ago_ , she says. _If I’d only known then—_

“You’re one of them,” he says, wondering. “You’re an Ancient.”

She gives a short nod, but that’s all the answer he gets. He should ask how that’s even possible, but he forgets to. Because then she steps forward into the green and lifts off her helmet, and _breathes_.

 

 

 

 

“So,” Sam says, behind him in the dark. Faint tracks of emergency lighting illuminate the floor, but not much else. “What do we know about this place? Anything?”

“Not a whole lot,” Dean tells him. “Kali called it a Legacy. Which I kinda thought was a bunch of old books, but…” He shrugs. Then he falls silent, as the familiar clank and whirr of a generator coming to life sounds in his ears, and the lights come on.

The structure is huge—several levels tall and much deeper, dug into the earth like a silo but with a door at ground level, opening out on air and light and safety. Dean could tell that much from the outside, but when the lights come on, he still lets out a low whistle.

There are levels upon levels of storage bays and lockers. Some of them are shuttered; others, Dean can see into. There’s equipment: things he recognises, like tools and generators, and things he doesn’t. Things that look half-familiar, reminding him of pictures from the Legacy.

A huge bank of computers stands in the centre of the storehouse. Their displays are blank, and Dean doesn’t understand the symbols on the control panel. IT and Mechanical have always spoken different languages.

It’s Sam who takes the first step towards it.

“Mind if I take a look at this?” he says. Dean isn’t sure whether Sam’s speaking to him, or Kali, or just the world in general.

He shrugs. “Sure, Sammy,” he says. “You don’t gotta ask permission.”

Sam blinks back at him. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you’re right.”

Dean is right, and he thinks maybe he didn’t even know it himself until it came out of his mouth. It’s tough to get his head around the idea. A world that’s no longer circumscribed. Freedom.

Sam’s fingers move over the control panel. He’s ginger, moving like he’s afraid to hit the wrong switch and make the whole shebang self-destruct, but after a moment he takes a deep breath that Dean sees in his shoulders and presses a button.

There’s a silence and then a whir, and then lights blink into life. A screen in the center flickers, and writing scrolls across the screen.

Somewhere to Dean’s left, Kali lets out a soft, surprised laugh. “I thought it was absurd,” she says. “When you told me how afraid your people were of _IT_.”

Dean’s only half-hearing her, his eyes fixed on Sam, who’s reading from the screen with a wondering expression. “Yeah?” he says. “How do you figure?”

“In my time it meant something rather different. It was less to do with hiding information. Mostly, at least.”

Dean just nods. It’s a pretty strange idea, IT being something neutral, but after the rest of Kali’s story, he thinks he’s pretty well inured to weird.

The Ancients built the silos, and then they ravaged the earth with nanites—tiny machines, too small for the eye to see. Nothing that Dean could take apart with his hands and understand. It’s those that pervade the air and the soil above the silos, eating flesh and bone and any organic thing away to dust. The Ancients programmed them to recede from the rest of the earth once the damage was done, keeping their descendants locked away underground while the planet regenerated itself.

And regenerate it has. Trees, a dozen times the size of the stunted things they grew in the mids. Grass spreading over the ground as far as the eye can see. Birds soaring into the sky—blue and clear, edged with grey clouds out on the horizon.

The horizon. Banding the earth around them, the limit of the eyes’ reach. Seeing it makes Dean feel a little lightheaded; he’d never admit it, but being back inside for a moment is kind of a relief. It’s not a bad thing, feeling all that space expand around him and take his breath away. It’s just overwhelming. They’ve been kept hidden from the whole world so long, and now they can just walk out into it. They can live.

“I think I know what this place is now,” Sam’s voice says, beside him.

Dean turns and grins at him. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s the fucking motherlode. It’s how we start living again.”

It’s the one single thing the Ancients did right.

Or, one of the Ancients, anyway. That might be the toughest part to believe out of the whole saga. Nobody who contributed to this—designing the silos and building them, inventing the nanotechnology, setting down the Order and the Legacy—really knew what they were doing. That they weren’t just preparing for the end of their world; they were gonna bring it about. _That_ part was down to one guy, and as far as they know, he’s still walking around, down there in Silo One. There are still thousands of people in the other silos, maybe thrown into confusion by Gabriel’s broadcast, but trapped in the system he built. God knows what’s gonna happen to them.

There ought to be something they can do to help. Maybe there is, and they just haven’t thought of it yet.

Dean can’t right now, though. Maybe his brain doesn’t have room for it, with all the other new stuff it’s having to take in. Maybe he’s just too selfish, or too damn tired, sick of struggling against something that seemed so much bigger than him, sick of being afraid.

Right now—right now, they have this. He and Sam and Jess and _Cas_ , and all the people from both their silos. They’ve radioed back to Twenty-One, and more people will be on their way to join them anytime; anyone who wants to come out here will head up over the next couple days. There’s gonna be a hell of a lot of work to do.

But they have this, and this is enough.

 

 

 

 

It’s a few hours later when the next group of people from the silo make it out. White cleaning suits loom into view out of the dust, ghosts coming to life.

Dean’s surprised, when he squints at the approaching figures and finds one leading another by the hand, a gentle guiding hand on her shoulder. They aren’t close enough for him to see their faces, but he knows who they are: Pam, and Ash, who she seems to have adopted as a general assistant since they ran from their silo.

Their feet meet the grass, and they come to a stop only a couple feet from Dean. Pam pulls off the helmet of her cleaning suit and he watches her take a deep breath, her forehead creasing in wonderment. The air smells different out here. There’s a little of the same damp, green smell that pervaded the mids, but it’s not just that. Out here something cold and clean hits you when you inhale. You could never mistake it for the air underground.

Dean takes a step towards Pam. He’s startled, when she flinches and takes a step back as he approaches her. Then it occurs to him that footsteps on solid ground sound different to footsteps within the silo. It might take her a while to be able to recognise who’s coming that way again.

“Hey,” he says, quietly. “You made it.”

“I did,” she says. Her face relaxes a little as she recognises his voice, but she doesn’t smile, and after a moment he steps back and lets her be.

She crouches to touch the ground, digging her fingers into the grass and holding on, like she’s anchoring herself. Like being up here on top of the world, she’s afraid she might blow away.

 

 

 

 

Cas finds him a couple hours later. He’s in one of the lower levels of the storehouse—back underground, which feels steadying and like being trapped both at once. Dean’s standing in front of a locker full of building equipment with Benny, talking about design plans so they don’t have to talk about Bobby being dead, when Cas touches his shoulder.

He startles and spins round, catching his breath when he sees it’s just Cas. Cas’s eyes that look at him like they’re seeing him for the first time, every time; Cas’s hand sliding down his arm to interlace their fingers. Right here, where anyone could see. Cas doesn’t have to be a secret anymore.

Benny raises an eyebrow. “Should I leave you two alone?” he says, and Dean realises he’s grinning like an idiot.

Cas makes a noise that might be exasperated or amused, and looks very seriously at Dean.

“The blind woman,” he says. “Pam. She’s your friend?”

Dean feels his smile fade. Feels like an asshole, all of a sudden, for forgetting himself long enough to be happy when so many people have lost so damn much.

“Yeah,” he says. “Least, she was. I’m not so sure she feels that way anymore.”

“You should come with me,” Cas says, and leads him away by the hand.

Pam’s standing with her hands wrist deep in a bin of—something. Dean squints as he gets closer. Seeds. It’s a bin full of seeds.

She doesn’t turn her head, but this time she obviously recognises his footsteps, her shoulders relaxing as he approaches.

“Your brother says he has all kinds of information on that computer,” she says. “Seasons, weather patterns. As soon as the time’s right, I can start growing things again.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Pretty sure there are all kinds of how-tos on that thing. And you know Sammy’s a giant baby genius. He’ll help you out.”

“He better,” she says, with the barest suggestion of her old smirk.

“So. What are you gonna grow?”

“Tomatoes,” she says, with a shrug. “Corn. Apples.” Her smiles widens fractionally. “Plus my own special crop, of course. Grabbed a couple things before I ran.”

Dean only barely registers that last part, though. He’s turning to meet Cas’s eyes, to see his bright unguarded smile. “You hear that, Cas?” he says. “We’re gonna have apple trees. We’re gonna build a place to live in together, and we’re gonna see the sky every damn day, and we’re gonna have apple trees.”

It’s a dream, one that’s only gonna come to fruition on the other side of maybe years of hard work. But the way Cas looks into his eyes and squeezes his hand makes him believe it.

 

 

 

 

It’s getting dark by the time Dean makes his way back outside. He keeps getting pulled off in different directions by different people, something which makes him feel uncomfortably like they still think of him as some kind of leader. He doesn’t know how they can, after everything that happened. He’s gonna have to do something about it, sometime soon. Sit them down and explain that if they want a leader, they can ask Jody or Rufus or even Sam. Dean isn’t gonna shirk his responsibilities; he’ll pitch in, do whatever’s needed. Just… not that.

He’ll have to explain that sometime soon. But not right now.

Some of the others have gotten a fire going, and they’re sitting on the ground around it in ones and twos. Dean finds himself a spot on his own and sits down, tugging idly at the grass with his fingers, wondering at the cool, living reality of it.

Cas finds him, a little while later. Dean isn’t sure how long it is; he’s barely glanced at the time display on his wrist since they discovered the storehouse. There’s no change of shifts to mark the passing of the day, no staircase lights flickering on and off at designated intervals, just the slowly darkening sky. Cas doesn’t speak. He sits beside Dean on the grass and leans against him, their arms pressing together in companiable silence. Tired, Dean leans back into him, and they sink down onto the ground by inches until they’re lying on their backs, looking up at the stars.

Dean won’t ever be able to stop thinking of them as Sam’s. He glances off to his left, and sees Sam and Jess lying on the ground, looking up, just like he and Cas are. As he watches, Jess raises one hand, pointing to some star or another with a question, and Sam reaches up to take it, murmuring an answer too quietly for Dean to hear.

The stars might be Sam’s, but right now, seeing them like this, Dean thinks he gets the wonder of them. How huge the sky looks. How huge the world is, up here. How limitless. How free.

How much it cost to get here.

He feels Cas’s hand in his own. Cas props himself up on an elbow and looks down at him. He looks tired, same as they all do, but his eyes are soft, his smile small and tinged with sadness, but genuine. He brushes Dean’s cheek with the pad of his thumb, and Dean turns his head into the touch, closing his eyes.

“You okay?” he asks Cas, with his eyes still closed.

Cas makes a surprised little noise, but after a moment, he says, “It’s a lot to take in.”

Dean smiles, at that. He still doesn’t really feel like he should be able to, but he does. “Yeah,” he replies, quietly. “Kinda hard to believe we have this, huh?”

“You still don’t believe you deserve this. After everything.” He can hear the realisation in Cas’s voice, and it’s sad, but there’s no rancor in it.

Cas sounds disappointed, but it doesn’t feel like Cas is disappointed in _him_.

He opens his eyes. “I don’t know,” he admits, and waits. A nervous twinge in his stomach, because yeah, he knows he’s damaged goods, he damn well should be, and while he doesn’t think Cas is just gonna up and get sick of him, he kind of wouldn’t blame him if he did.

But all Cas does is lean down, press a kiss to Dean’s forehead, and says, “I do. And so will you.”

It’s so damn earnest, so sincere, so _Cas_ , and so of course the only way Dean knows how to respond is with a raised eyebrow and “Gonna make me, huh?”

“Yes,” Cas says, simply. He seems content not to push it further, though; just settles his head on Dean’s shoulder and lays there with him, looking up at the unbounded sky, breathing the clean air.

 

 

 

 

“Okay, uh, you wanna go first?”

Dean shakes his head at Sam. “Nah, man. I ain’t got the gravitas. Jody should kick this off.”

She inclines her head, looks around the assembled crowd for objections, then takes a step forward. She’s holding a small wooden cross in her hand, lashed together out of branches from one of the nearby trees.

“For the dead of our silos,” she says, and plants the cross in the ground. She bows her head, stands there for a moment, her lips moving quietly. Dean can’t hear the names she’s saying, but he’s pretty sure he can guess them. The husband and son whose graves she’s leaving behind, in the mids of the silo they called home.

Jody takes a step back.

Jo’s up next. She stoops to plant her cross in the ground. “Ellen Harvelle.” She wipes a hand across her face. “Mom.”

Cas steps up. “Samandriel,” he says. “Balthazar.”

Rufus and Nancy, together. “Victor Henriksen.”

Kali. “Gabriel.” She pauses. "Meg."

Dean doesn't know who that is. Jess speaks a couple other unfamiliar names. It’s only when she steps back into Sam’s side, scrubbing her eyes, and he puts an arm around her that Dean realises they must have been family.

And so it goes on, crosses pushed into the ground like they’re planting a forest, the names of the dead hanging and dissipating in the air. Many of them are repeated. Makes sense, as far as Dean can tell. Most of these people had more than one person that loved them.

Dean and Sam step forward together. There are so damn many names on their list. Bobby and Karen. Ellen.

Sam insists on saying the names of the suicide bombers, because nobody else here is gonna speak for them, and he says they’re victims, too. It’s not something Dean’s ever gonna agree with, but he’s learning that it’s not an argument either of them is ever gonna win.

He leaves those to Sam, but he joins in with the last couple names, the ones that really matter, as they kneel to plant their crosses in the ground.

“John Winchester. Mary Winchester.”

Honestly, Dean didn’t really think he had in him to cry; figured everything they’ve been through had beaten it out of him. But as he steps back into the crowd, he finds himself wiping his face just like everybody else. It doesn’t feel bad, though, weirdly enough. These are honest tears. He knows what he’s crying for, and there’s something about that that feels free.

Cas takes his hand, and they stand there for a long time. While the last names are spoken; while the assembled crowd drifts away in ones and twos.

And then, hand in hand, they turn their backs on the silos.

They turn to face the world.


End file.
